300 The Report of the Boxjal Commission on Horse-Breeding . 
by taking brood mares from their appearance you would cast 
very many of the best brood mares in England." 36 
Thus, upon the whole, we may take for granted that the 
present money is insufficient for the subsidising of mares, and 
that a selection of mares, desirable as it may be, is therefore 
not practicable. Farmers would not like the interference and 
the possibility of having their mare crabbed and made un- 
saleable ; and it is doubtful if they would consider this risk 
worth running for the sake of an increased prospective value of 
their stock, which, however, might be fairly assumed. Thus, as 
things are, we must breed our mares, and Mr. Welby, when 
asked if he could suggest any better means of improving his 
mares than by breeding fillies from good sound stallions, said : 
" Oh, everything depends upon that. One of the first things I 
should encourage would be the breeding from the two-year-old 
mares ; " 37 and again, when asked whether, in his opinion, in 
attempting to improve the horses of this country, the Commission 
had not exercised a wise discretion in confining themselves in 
the first instance to stallions, replied : " That is my opinion, and 
always has been, that the female animal was the one wanted, 
because it comes home to the producer and farmer." 38 
The fact is, that for some time past farmers have been very 
poor. In the Midlands the fall in the prices of stock, in Holderness 
and Lincolnshire the fall in the price of wheat, have ruined, or 
half ruined, many farmers, obliged them to give up hunting and 
breeding, and to sell the idle mettled mare to the foreigner, or 
even to the cabman. The Fylde, formerly a great district for 
harness-horses, has turned its attention to breeding draught- 
horses as giving a better return. In the grazing districts, a 
man who, in olden days, kept active hacks to ride about his 
business, and which bred him many a good foal, now gets into 
a railway compartment ; aud in the northern Dales the, small 
farmers no longer plough a patch of land for the oatmeal which 
used to be the staple food of these districts ; it is cheaper to 
buy wheaten flour, and the light-legged mare which did the 
ploughing and carried her master about on fair-days no longer 
earns her keep, and so has disappeared. A competent authority 
declared at the Rosebery Committee, that in Yorkshire sheep 
and cattle had eaten up the horse ; and it is little satisfaction 
for us now to be told that they in then- turn have been eaten up 
by Australian beef and Australian mutton. Still, for my own 
part, I believe in that principle of self-recovery to which I have 
already alluded. 
" 2'J35-G. 
37 3901. 
88 3910. 
