rowing love for dumb animals is grateful
to my mind; for any one who has a true, kindly love for pets cannot be
wholly bad. While I gently ridicule the people who keep useless brutes
to annoy their neighbours, I would rather see even the hideous, useless
pug kept to wheeze and snarl in his old age than see no pets at all.
Good luck to all good folk who love animals, and may the reign of
kindness spread!

_March, 1888._

_THE ETHICS OF THE TURF_.

When Lord Beaconsfield called the Turf a vast engine of national
demoralization, he uttered a broad general truth; but, unfortunately, he
did not go into particulars, and his vague grandiloquence has inspired a
large number of ferocious imitators, who know as little about the
essentials of the matter as Lord Beaconsfield did. These imitators abuse
the wrong things and the wrong people; they mix up causes and effects;
they are acrid where they should be tolerant; they know nothing about
the real evils; and they do no good, for the simple reason that racing
blackguards never read anything, while cultured gentlemen who happen to
go racing smile quietly at the blundering of amateur moralists. Sir
Wilfrid Lawson is a good man and a clever man; but to see the kind of
display he makes when he gets up to talk about the Turf is very
saddening. He can give you an accurate statement concerning the evils of
drink, but as soon as he touches racing his innocence becomes woefully
apparent, and the biggest scoundrel that ever entered the Ring can
afford to make game of the harmless, well-meaning critic. The subject is
an intricate one, and you cannot settle it right off by talking of
"pampered nobles who pander to the worst vices of the multitude;" and
you go equally wrong if you begin to shriek whenever that inevitable
larcenous shopboy whimpers in the dock about the temptations of betting.
We are poisoned by generalities; our reformers, who use press and
platform to enlighten us, resemble a doctor who should stop by a
patient's bedside and deliver an oration on bad health in the abstract
when he ought to be finding out his man's particular ailment. Let us
clear the ground a little bit, until we can see something definite. I am
going to talk plainly about things that I know, and I want to put all
sentimental rubbish out of the road.

In the first place, then, horse-racing, in itself, is neither degrading
nor anything else that is bad; a race is a beautiful and exhilarating
specta