822 ARMY FARRIERS AND SHOEING SMITHS. 
Experience advises us to be content with little achievements 
or with none at all ; to bear with deferential grace and silent 
fortitude the perplexities that have always been attached to 
this subject, and to allow our thwarted energies to return to 
the confined track of duty, beyond which, even for good, it 
is not politic to step. 
To ensure assistance in carrying out the duties of the army 
veterinary surgeon it is requisite to teach some one to act in 
a subordinate degree. The recipients of his instructions are 
acting shoeing smiths, shoeing smiths and farriers, or, rather, 
these are the men at whom instruction is directed, and upon 
whom it is, to a great extent, lost. Their education, as a rule, 
is of the meanest order, and their susceptibility to imbibe 
mentally is not in excess. Prejudices prevent the right exer- 
cise of their understandings in many cases ; stubborn and 
headstrong dispositions have to be dealt with in others ; whilst 
that temperament, wherein brute force is a predominating 
quality, may be considered to be more or less inherent in all. 
We will first glance at the “ acting shoeing-smiths.” 
Our experience points to many who have been selected 
from the ranks and placed in the forge, perhaps on account 
of their incompetency in positions where more ability was 
required, and perhaps not. Some had been tradesmen previous 
to enlisting, whilst others had never known the trade of smith, 
shoeing, or otherwise, until they entered the forge of a battery 
or regiment. In the shoeing forges of the army it is not 
usual to find intelligence and ability on intimate terms with 
each other, they seldom go hand in hand; neither is it 
customary to see the majority of smiths doing credit to the 
art they are striving to learn. 
No one doubts but that a man’s physical powers should be 
well developed to fit him for the duties of acting shoeing 
smith, but why their consideration should preclude the just 
observance of his mental capacity we have not been able to 
discover. At the time of his selection it is not considered 
that he will be called upon to think, to exercise his own 
faculties, to carry out the ideas of his instructors, or that his 
mind should be a shade more comprehensive than that re- 
quired to stand to him in the forge and shoeing shed. Quali- 
fications of this type are overlooked, and the result is that 
many a one occupies a post the duties of which he is unable 
to discharge. A request for the removal of such is met by 
“ Men cannot be spared or found for substitution ; ” or it is 
thought “ no improvement could be made.” Instances have 
been known where improvement might have been made, but 
hard work and no pay are not baits to tempt intelligent men 
