CANKER. 359 
which otherwise should be confined to the animals of poverty, on which 
bad lodging, no grooming, stinted food, and hard work produce sad 
effects. The stable in which a case of canker occurs is lamentably dis- 
graced. Every attendant in it ought to be discharged, as the surest 
evidence of a gross want of industry is thereby afforded. 
A horse, perhaps once the pride of the favorite daughter, may descend 
to be the hack of some bawling dust collector. Its wants increase as 
age progresses; but with the accumulation of years its hardships aug- 
ment. It is sad, very sad, to stand within the shed of some corn-chand- 
ler, and witness, as the day draws in, ragged boys advance and shout 
out, “ Three pen’orth o’ ’ay bunds.” Upon those hay-bands it is even 
more sad to reflect what creature will be obliged to subsist—probably the 
darling once of some aristocratic children! Now, cramped and diseased, it 
may receive no other food between this time and the following evening. 
The diet being meager, all the rest is on a parallel. The wretched ani- 
mal is purchased only for such a space as it may pull through before it 
passes to the knackers. Every day of life is looked upon as a clear gain, 
for the carcass may be sold for very nigh the price which has been paid 
for the living body. The commonest attention is denied; its bed is filth, 
and its nightly hay-bands are cast upon the flooring. 
What, the humane reader may inquire, can be done to prevent such a 
state of things? Something surely might be accomplished. To make 
men good, it is first necessary to educate them by communicating knowl- 
edge and also by preventing the commission of wickedness. Were the 
sanitary laws enforced in their spirit, no man would keep an animal who 
had not proper accommodation for the creature he possessed as a prop- 
erty. A horse or a donkey consumes much more air than any human 
being. The air ejected from the lungs of a quadruped is deprived of all 
life-sustaining qualities. The filth of a stable is as corruptive as any 
cess-pool connected with a laborer’s cottage. The atmosphere which 
can in the horse engender disease cannot promote health in the superior 
animal. Yet how does it happen that, while sanitary reports are elo- 
quent upon filth and fluent about cess-pools—while they descant learnedly 
upon foul abodes, and enter into all particulars concerning corrupted 
atmosphere—the close, contaminated stables in which all costermongers, 
and some gentlemen, shut up their drudges when the labor of the day is 
over, are never alluded to, are altogether abjured, as though such nui- 
sances had no existence ? 
Canker, like thrush, is not generally attended with much lameness. 
It often astonishes us that, with a foot in such a condition, the animal 
can progress so soundly. It invariably commences at the seat of thrush 
or in the cleft of the frog. A liquid more abominable than that of thrush, 
