Little John, and Peacemaker run over the
race-course where now yon suburban village flourishes, in the year
eighteen hundred and ever-so-few? Though I never owned a horse, have I
not been the proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the
prettiest little "Morgin" that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an
opinion I have often expressed long before this venture of ours in
England. Horse-_racing_ is not a republican institution;
horse-_trotting_ is. Only very rich persons can keep race-horses,
and everybody knows they are kept mainly as gambling implements. All
that matter about blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all
that; useful, very,--_of_ course,--great obligations to the
Godolphin "Arabian," and the rest. I say racing horses are
essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am
not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some
other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is
not republican. It belongs to two phases of society,--a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the
reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a
civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real republicanism
is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in
the omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This public
opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can and
does compel it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing is the
most public way of gambling; and with all its immense attractions to
the sense and the feelings,--to which I plead very susceptible,--the
disguise is too thin that covers it, and everybody knows what it
means. Its supporters are the Southern gentry,--fine fellows, no
doubt, but not republicans exactly, as we understand the term,--a few
Northern millionnaires more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not
represent the real people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of
whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have
near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on the
other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural
growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all
classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled
corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise
the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down