VICIOUS HORSES. 
95 
We will suppose a colt got by Alarm (about as savage a horse 
as any living): this colt shews savage and vicious propensities 
even at his dam’s side; these vices we have reason on our side in 
supposing to be inherent—in fact, inherited from his sire; this 
merely proves that the sire was vicious, and the progeny inherited 
the same or some of the same vices. We must, to come to any 
definite conclusion, investigate ivhy Alarm was, or is, as vicious as 
we find him. He is not a horse I am much acquainted with, so I 
cannot answer the question. If his sire or dam were vicious, we 
must then ask why were they so: all this may go back for two, 
three, or ten generations, and all may have inherited the family 
vice; we have still to ask what made the tenth generation back 
vicious ? I will answer for it that it was not that they were bom 
so—at least it would be one instance in a thousand if they w'ere. 
Even with man, whom I consider a more vicious animal than 
quadrupeds are, vice is not a natural propensity;—to err is. Adam 
erred in listening to the persuasion of a beautiful woman (who 
would not err in the same case?), but he was not vicious; and 
though man has been so for ages, it is not nature that made him 
so, but intercourse with other men : in other words, the world, de¬ 
privation, unkindness, ingratitude, hope deferred ending in disap¬ 
pointment, services or labour ill repaid, injustice, calumny, and all 
those ills that flesh is heir to—all conspire to disgust him with his 
fellow-man, on whom he turns round a made but not a natural 
savage. 
So it is with horses, whether we go to the large tracts of Cleve¬ 
land pasturage, the fenny acres of Lincolnshire, the woody precincts 
of Windsor or the New Forest, be it hunter, cart-horse, or pony, 
his natural disposition is nearly the same: but we will travel fur¬ 
ther a-field, and suppose ourselves in the palpas of America, the 
Ukraine of the Tartar, the treeless and shrubless plains of the 
Falkland Islands, or the almost equally naked wastes of Patagonia, 
we shall only arrive at the same fact, whether the horse is tram¬ 
melled with the halter or the lasso. From the innate love of li¬ 
berty born with all creatures, the innate hatred of servitude, and 
the distrust of man, whether it arises from his being strange to us, 
or from knowing him too intimately, the captive struggles to 
escape : but with the quadruped the struggle soon ceases; he feels 
he is captured, and, though his struggles were violent, they pro¬ 
ceeded not from vice , but a love of liberty and a fear of man. A 
few days, nay a few hours, bring him to a state wherein he offers 
no violence or vice to his captor, and this is generally repaid on 
the part of the latter, more or less, by severity and ill-usage. 
There is something so vain, so foolish, and so overbearing, in the 
mind of man, that whatever or whoever in any shape refuses or 
