572 Report upon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilburn. 
tenant-farmers, as a rule, to try their hands at breeding hunters ; 
and secondly, because no steps are taken by the Royal Agri- 
cultural Society to ascertain that the thoroughbred stallions 
entered for competition at their show-yards are available for 
farmers' mares at a fee within the compass of their owners' 
pockets. 
For these reasons it appears meet and proper that in a Report 
which has nearly 700 animals of the equine species for its subject- 
matter, special and even exhaustive attention should be bestowed 
upon the three cart-horse divisions, whether English (so-called), 
Clydesdales, or Suflolks, which were beyond question unmatched 
for excellence in any other department of the horse-show, and 
which, in addition, possess and can never be divested of 
peculiar attractions for owners and cultivators of the soil. I 
propose, therefore, to take a rapid glance at the origin and 
development of each of the three cart-horse tribes repre- 
sented in the Catalogue, deeming it none of my business to 
invade the province of the Judges in each class by critically 
comparing one animal with another among those exhibited for 
competition. The reports of these Judges, necessarily restricted, 
and more or less technical in their phraseology, are appended, 
and will speak for themselves ; but in the ' Journal of the 
Royal Agricultural Society ' a loftier aim should not be lost 
siffht of. There are few now living: to remember that at the 
first banquet of the Society in 1839, with the late Earl Spencer 
in the chair, Daniel Webster, perhaps the most famous orator 
that the United States have ever produced, was present as a 
guest, and that in the words affixed to the striking speech then 
delivered by him, and inserted in the first volume of his collec- 
tive works, " he made a deep impression upon those who heard 
him." Mr. Webster's flowing eloquence contrasted strangely 
with the hesitating and involved sentences of Lord Spencer, 
whose style of speaking in the House of Commons, subtracting 
nothing from his great and deserved influence, is elaborately 
described in Mr. Greville's famous Memoirs ; but it cannot be 
inappropriate at this moment to recall that, upon the night of 
its inauguration, the Royal Agricultural Society was consecrated 
to high and ambitious purposes by an illustrious visitor " from 
that great country, whose people," as Lord Spencer remarked, 
" we are legally obliged to call foreigners, but who are still our 
brethren in blood." Upon that memorable night Mr. Webster 
elevated the three thousand agriculturists who heard him, to a 
nobler conception of their calling than they had theretofore 
entertained ; and "in concluding with the most fervent expres- 
sion of his wish for the prosperity and usefulness of the Royal 
Agricultural Society of England," he laid, as it were, an embargo 
