ty of motion that
gratify the popular aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial
serviceability. The horse is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude
for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers
effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of
the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own
dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least
potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that
he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse
lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the
owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip
his neighbor's. This use being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty
consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific,
and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of
reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a similarly
non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument.

The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the canon of
pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty
or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance
of the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory
aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a
beautiful animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to
the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class
of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in
abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fancier's award. To this
untutored taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has
suffered less radical alteration than the race-horse under the
breeder's selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer
or speaker--especially of those whose eloquence is most consistently
commonplace wants an illustration of animal grace and serviceability,
for rhetorical use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly
makes it plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the
race-horse.

It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties
of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even
moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible
another and more direct line of influence of the leisure-class cano