PRACTICAL PAPERS—HORSES. 
3 ° i 
ism between the different industries of the world—that they are 
joint partners in the common work of satisfying the wants and 
desires of men. But they also teach that these industries are and 
ought to be, competitors in regard to the distribution of the 
rewards for service done, and that “ eternal vigilance ” is no little 
part of the price of industrial success. 
HORSES. 
Read before the State Agricultural Convention in February, 1873, 
BY HON. JOHN L. MITCHELL, MILWAUKEE. 
Gentlemen: —You have all heard of the expression, “horse 
sense.” What I have to present to you is horse nonsense—the 
nonsense of many people, as it seems to me, in a few matters per¬ 
taining to the horse. Whether or no I am nonsensical myself, 
remains with you to judge. 
It is not necessary to remind you that a horse has four legs, a 
head and a tail, unless cruelty has deprived him of this latter ap¬ 
pendage. Horse points will not be alluded to, as every American 
citizen is presumed to know all about them, and it would be in¬ 
sult to insinuate otherwise. The little that is to follow has to do 
with horses bred for intelligence, activity and endurance, in other 
words speed horses, and not with those ponderous and slow 
moving animals that we call draft horses. 
To begin with the beginning—and the horse beginning is the 
thoroughbred; he is the equine aristocrat, and he holds his title 
by virtue of deeds and not by mere pretension, as is the case with 
some aristocrats that we know of. The term thoroughbred, as ap¬ 
plied to the horse, is generally misunderstood in this neighborhood. 
Technically, the thoroughbred of to-day is the embodied result 
in horse hide of breeding for many generations for speed and 
staying qualities at the gallop. The first we hear of running 
horses and their systematic breeding, is in England, at the begin¬ 
ning of the 17th century. By borrowing the fleet blood of the 
