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; ; VALUE OF THOROUGHBRED BREEDING Recognizod by European Governments During the Darkest Days of the Great World War, NEW YOIIIC. N. Y., December 9. At no time in the course of the last five years, not even while the great war was at its height, did the central empires stop the racing of thoroughbred horses. The great tracks of Hamburg, Budapest, Vienna and Berlin were the scenes of brilliant gatherings, even when the Grand Duke Nicholas was threatening East Prussia with invasion and Brusilof was on the edge of the plains of Hungary with his wild Cossack riders. At no time during the course of the great war were American and English trainers and jockeys, who had been caught by the declaration of war in Germany and Austria -Hungary and " were unable to obtain passports, interned. They were permitted by governments their governments were seeking to destroy to pursue their accustomed callings unmolested and unrestrained. To a certain extent racing was curtailed in Great Britain during the first two years of the great war. The use of the famous Epsom Downs course as a resting place for convalescing soldiers necessitated the running of the famous Epsom Derby :it Newmarket in 1914, 1915, 1915, 1917 and 1918. The preoccupation of the s-ortsmen of Great Britain in the busiiu.-s of war caused them, to a certain extent, to neglect the thoroughbred sales of 1915. 1915 and 1917 and Americans were" enabled to slip in and buy up a lot of high-class stallions and mares with which to enrich the American thoroughbred industry . Of the great nations participating in the great war France alone felt the necessity of stopping horse raping. Threatened with utter destruction in a flood of Teutonic barbarism France had to send to the fighting lines on the Marne, the Homme, the Aisne about Verdun, in the Vosges every male Frenchman capable of learing arms. Back of the fighting lines she had to mobilize the elderly men with the women and children for the imperative work of making munitions. tlion France alone fell the burden of resisting the German tide for upward of two years. Throughout the course of the war speed tests were held at the great French tracks, but not as public spectacles. But there was no letting down of the bars" as regards the exportation from France of thoroughbred blood anv time during the war. As a sieeial.:-onWf"ration citizens, of -the "nited-States -a country from which the French from the verv beginning of the war were drawing enormous quantities of military material, who had thoroughbred studs in France, such men as John Sanford of Amsterdam. Major August Belmont, Joseph E. Wide-ner and Thomas P. Thome, were permitted when transportation was available to ship to the United States a limited numler of thoroughbred yearlings. No matured thoroughbred stallioiis or mares were allowed to leave the country, whether their owners were Frenchmen or ontlanrters. With the signing of the armistice France and England resumed racing with characteristic enthusiasm. The attendance at the race tracks about Paris has lteen greater this season than in any for the period of a half dozen years preceding the outbreak of the great War. The crowds that witnessed the running of the Derby, the Oaks, the Ascot Gold Cup, the St. Ecger, etc.. in Great Britain were greater by the thousands than the greatest of ante-bellum race track gatherings. RACING AND BREEDING INDISPENSABLE. In France and Great Britain the patronage of horse racing by the public has the highest government encouragement now as the support of racing had in Germany and Austria-Hungary even through the dark mouths when human beings were finding it difficult to obtain nourishing food. France and England recognize today as Germany and Austria -Hungary have for many days the indispensability of thoroughbred blood to national defense and necessity of thoroughbred horse racing for the maintenance at its highest efficiency of thoroughbred blcod. For upward of seventy years previous to the beginning of the great war the military governments of Continental Europe had been maintaining thoroughbred studs for the production of military horses, an earlier century of experimentation having demonstrated to the satisfaction of experts that it was the horse that boasted of the greatest proportion of thoroughbred blood that showed the highest efficiency in military service, whether as a troopers mount, an artillery horse or a part of the transport service. The great war had not progressed two years before British and French specialists discovered that the life of the pure thoroughbred under the grueling conditions of war, independently of casualties, was twenty-five. days, while that of the three-quarter blood was twenty to twenty-two, of the half-bred seventeen, of the trotter fourteen and of the lesser breeds of horses of no particular breed five to seven. Previous to the war of the nations the British government had left the production of horses for the army to private enterprises. The British had merely muddled along as is their habit in most things. The difficulty the war office experienced in equipping witli suitable horses the cavalry, transport and artillery services of the treniendous armies that were being assembled in France in 1910 and 1917 .wider Haig convinced the rulers of the British Empire that the old haphazard scheme would not answer in future. The British parliament was therefore constrained to accept the 1917 Major Hall Walkers generous offer of his entire thoroughbred stud as the nucleus of a great imperial military horse breeding establishment, and to employ Lord Lonsdale to manage and race the produce of that establishment on the tracks of Great Britain for purposes of elimination as the imperial German government had employed various scions of German royalty to race the produce of the national studs of Graditz and Trekennen for thirty-five or forty years before the outbreak of the great war. The munificence of Major Walkers gift to his country will be understood when it is realized that his stud had been taxed on a valuation of upward of ,000,000. Now that the war is over parliament is beginning to appropriate vast sums annually for the maintenance of this imperial horse breeding establishment after the manner such establishments had been maintained in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy for half a century before the German invasion of Belgium. To promote the quick production of quantities of horses of thoroughbred, three-quarter bred and half-bred types this establishment is preparing to give direct support to the Canadian National Bureau of Breeding, which was established some seven or eight years prior to 1914, and which supplied the Canadian and British forces with thousands of splendid half-breds, and to create subsidiary branches in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.
