568 Report upon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilburn. 
doubtful utility, but are nevertheless of the highest attractive- 
ness to spectators, whose shillings and half-crowns contribute 
so materially towards defraying the enormous and inevitable 
expenses of these costly annual efforts. Perhaps the Council 
may to a certain degree be unconscious that a show conducted 
upon the Procrustean principle of bare and unrelieved utility — a 
show of horses, in short, from which everything except Clydes- 
dales, Suffolks, and other animals of a like type should be 
rigorously excluded — would be in the highest degree flat, stale, 
and unprofitable. " 1 pardon something," said Mr. Burke, 
in extenuation of the American insurrection of last century, 
"to the genius of liberty;" and in like manner the Council 
of the Royal Agricultural Society cannot reasonably be censured 
for addressing themselves anxiously to the consideration of the 
knotty question how the non-agricultural public are to be drawn 
in shoals to exhibitions from which in too many cases they can 
derive no instruction, and which, if horses of high breeding and 
comely form were prohibited from competition, would lack 
those attractive elements of amusement which crowd the Agri- 
cultural Hall at Islington to suffocation each succeeding June. 
It is, nevertheless, undeniable, first, that the most important 
classes of the Royal Agricultural Society's horse-shows are 
those devoted to stallions ; and secondly, that the most important 
stallion-classes are those filled by agricultural and draught 
horses. Indeed, it may safely be asserted that such exhibitions 
of stock as that which took place last July at Kilburn, though 
in former days upon a much smaller scale, have within the last 
forty years — that is to say, since the Royal Agricultural Society 
held, in 1839, its first annual synod at Oxford — had an incal- 
culable effect in improving and elevating the agricultural and 
draught horses of England ; seeing that, within the lifetime of 
many who have as yet hardly reached middle age, competi- 
tion and example have almost reconstructed the unwieldy and 
cumbersome quadrupeds by which, during the reigns of Her 
Majesty's three predecessors upon the throne, fallows were 
ploughed up, and the old broad-wheeled waggons, of which 
in his earliest books Charles Dickens has limned so njany a 
speaking picture, were slowly tugged along pra;-Macadamite 
roads. Nor is it to be denied that this valuable reform was 
actively stimulated by the ploughing-matches in which the 
great manufacturers of iron ploughs upon improved principles 
were eager to take part. Previous to 1^39, the iron plough was 
but little used in England, and most of the ploughing was done 
by two or three horses in single file, led or driven by a plough- 
boy walking beside them at a snail's pace, and holding in 
his hand a whip, of which the resounding crack carried little 
