WARRANTY OF HORSES. 
205 
whole of the facts previously spoken to, and he might add also 
by the admissions which he had reluctantly wrung from the 
witnesses for the defence. One of these gentlemen had set 
out by calling this disease “ nothing.” What could they 
think of a witness like this? Was spavin nothing? Was 
ossification nothing? Was inflammation nothing? They all 
knew the nature of inflammation and the character of an 
exostosis quite as well as he himself did. (Of course they 
did — quite as well.) And was the judgment of twelve intel- 
ligent Englishmen to be insulted by telling them that these 
things were nothing! Not likely. They would show by 
their verdict their estimation of such testimony as this. And 
they do show it ; for, after a good deal more in a similar strain, 
the defendant finds himself mulcted in heavy damages, and 
leaves the court amazed and stupefied, but innately resolving 
never to breed another horse, and, what is perhaps to be 
regretted more than all, steadily adheres to this resolution. 
Let no one think this an imaginary case, for, unfortunately, 
it is a too common one. It is merely an outline of the legal 
process by which a perfectly healthy animal — one without the 
slightest disease of any kind — is declared to be unsound. 
When there really does exist some ailment, of however trival 
and temporary a character — a splent, for instance, or a slight 
appearance of corn or thrush — of course, the process is much 
more simple. John the cook, and Thomas the gardener, 
both of whom know just as much about a horse as the horse 
himself may be supposed to know of Hebrew, can swear to 
his having gone tender, or stiff, or lame, probably because in 
their ignorance they believe so; and the jockey and the 
farrier can show what serious diseases these sometimes 
become, and what dreadful consequences might result if they 
were somewhere else than where they now happen to be ; and 
such formidable words as “inflammation,” and “suppura- 
tion,” and “contraction” — words so thoroughly understood 
alike by advocate, and judge, and jury — are bandied about 
with the utmost freedom, and with a frequency that cannot 
fail to have some effect on the court. Vainly is it shown 
that from his birth upwards the animal in dispute has never 
for an instant failed in his work, that even at that moment 
his value and utility are alike unimpaired. Of what avail are 
justice, and truth, and common sense, when weighed in the 
scale against the ruling of some learned judge long since 
gathered to his fathers, but whose spirit still hovers over the 
bench, and can only be appeased by a verdict which adds one 
more absurdity to a law that certainly stood in need of no 
such addition ? 
XXXI. 
28 
