orthy person derives any good from the cruel waste of
money and strength and energy. The writers know all this, and yet they
go on turning out their sham cordiality, sham congratulations, sham
justifications; while any of us who know thoroughly the misery and
mental death and ruin of souls brought on by racing and gambling are
labelled as un-English or churlish or something of the kind. Why should
we be called churlish? Is it not true that a million of men and women
waste a day on a pursuit which brings them into contact with filthy
intemperance, stupid debauch, unspeakable coarseness? The eruptive
sportsman tells us that the sight of a good man on a good horse should
stir every manly impulse in a Briton. What rubbish! What manliness can
there be in watching a poor baby-colt flogged along by a dwarf? If one
is placed at some distance from the course, then one may find the
glitter of the pretty silk jackets pleasing; but, should one chance to
be near enough to see what is termed "an exciting finish," one's
general conception of the manliness of racing may be modified. From afar
off the movement of the jockeys' whip-hands is no more suggestive than
the movement of a windmill's sails; but, when one hears the "flack,
flack" of the whalebone and sees the wales rise on the dainty skin of
the immature horse, one does not feel quite joyous or manly. I have seen
a long lean creature reach back with his right leg and keep on jobbing
with the spur for nearly four hundred yards of a swift finish; I saw
another manikin lash a good horse until the animal fairly curved its
back in agony and writhed its head on one side so violently that the
manly sporting-men called it an ungenerous brute. Where does the fun
come in for the onlookers? There is one good old thoroughbred which
remembers a fearful flogging that he received twenty-two years ago; if
he hears the voice of the man who lashed him, he sweats profusely, and
trembles so much that he is like to fall down. How is the breed of
horses directly improved by that kind of sport? No; the thousands of
wastrels who squander the day and render themselves unsettled and idle
for a week are not thinking of horses or of taking a healthy outing;
they are obeying an unhealthy gregarious instinct which in certain
circumstances makes men show clear signs of acute mania. If we look at
the unadulterated absurdity of the affair, we may almost be tempted to
rage like Carlyle or Swift. For weeks there are