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HORSES SCARCE FOR ENGLISH RACING Minor Meetings Suffer Greatly from Lack of Enough Racers to Furnish Reasonable Competition The greater race meetings of this year in England have done well enough in the way of fields suf ¬ ficient to provide entertaining racing but com ¬ paratively the minor meetings have been a frost for luck of horses In a general way the reason for this condition is set forth thus by Vigilant in London Sportsman of May 27 27If If anyone has been under the impression that a normal fixture list of meetings makes a normal racing season he must IH disillusioned now no matter how fervent an optimist lie may be The oiMMiing day of the York meeting brought out only fifteen horses to contest four races one of the two other events being declared void and the other resulting in a walkover In some quarters the debacle for it is nothing else is attributed to the hard ground wliich of course has its share in causing the trouble but if we go to the root of the matter we cannot help but see that the cause lies deeper Scarcity of old horses is the true reason why some races fail to fill and others peter out to nothing as we now see at York Four years of repression by government under pleas good or bad cannot fail to have their effect and we see the result of the stoppage of racing in May 115 or rather something of it for I do not think we have yet realize the worst of the action alleged to be taken in the public interest interestRome Rome was not built In a day neither was the British thoroughbred developed without the care and forethought of many years and he interruption of the process for something like four years is bound to leave a deep impression behind Horses which would have been trained were withheld altogether others which developed slowly were denied their chances of maturing and turned out of training and as we know only to well many owners not of the wealthy class or professionally interosted were forced to give up keeping horses York is ne of the results and except for those who regard racing merely as a spectacle and amusement it affords anything but a cheerful prospect The chief meetings like Epsom Ascot and Newmarket will not show the effects of the horse shortage so clearly but it will none the less be there and the little meetings will be the chief sufferers These minor gatherings are to my mind of immense im ¬ portance in that they tend to keep alive the horse loving and sporting instincts of the countryside and M preserve that public supi ort for breeding and rac ¬ ing without which they cannot resist the adverse influences arrayed against them
