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History of American Thoroughbred Thirtysixth Installment The question is answered in a moment Fourfifths of all the teams were broken down thoroughbreds and the remaining one fifth nearly pureblooded hunters all of them horses which had either gone slightly amiss so as to be thrown out of their original em ¬ ployment or had in the first instance been unfit owing to want of speed or some un soundness of wind or limb for the course or the field Nothing but these could have done the work The pace would have killed them the first day or if it had not done so they could not have come again in a week weekIROX IROX MUSCLES OF THOBOUGHBRED THOBOUGHBREDThese These game animals supported by their blood alone and the iron hardness peculiar to the bones and muscles of thoroughbreds many of them the leaders especially little weedylooking screws did it day after day at a rattling gallop except now and then up some steep ascent when they were pulled into a trot comparatively uninjured uninjuredThey They were of course well fed well groomed well housed and well driven and by well I mean not only bountifully and care ¬ fully but judiciously But there was the daily distance to be done and it had to be done and it was done in spite of roads and weather unless it were floods or snowdrifts I have often seen them so little the worse for the rating gallop of seven or eight miles in twentyfive minutes with three or four tons at their heels that they would bite at one another in play when unhitched and canter off to the stables with all their harness rat ¬ tling about them before the new team was in their places placesThat That speed the people demanded at that time It had to be effected and that it was effected was the consequence of there being thoroughbreds in England sufficiently numer ¬ ous and sufficiently cheap to be applied to coaching purposes purposesIt It is useless to decry the advantages of speedy travel in the early nineteenth cen ¬ tury when men would travel at the risk of incurring actual peril of life and limb if they traveled far and frequently equal to that faced by a soldier in active service in the fastest zind most Insecure of railroads and steamboats And it is just as absurd to decry the utility of speed in horseflesh which is not incompatible with perfect secur ¬ ity as it were to maintain that slow trains are preferable to fast ones and that it is better to cross the Atlantic in thirty days than in ten or eleven elevenFor For if it be as good or better it is evi ¬ dent that people will not do it itAnd And just as well may we expect a traveler purposely to select a slow steamer for an ocean transit as to drive a slow horse and a bad traveler when he can drive or ride one that rattles him off his fourteen or six ¬ teen miles in an hour with ease to himself and pleasure to his owner ownerIt It is a ultilitarian maxim of the age that time is money a maxim which we hear most earnestly insisted on by the antirace horse antitrialofspeed antieverysortofamuse ment Pharisees with whom money is not only the greatest but the only good goodFAST FAST HORSES MEAX MONET MONETNow Now it cannot be denied that in a far more matter of fact sense than that in which time is said to be money because out of time we may or may not according to our own abilities and other contingencies make money fast horses really are true hard money For in that exact ratio of their speed other things being equal will they command cash down downWhether Whether it be right or wrong wise or unwise in the world that it should be so so it is and so long as the world will give large prices for fast horses that can make the time and stay the distance so long do we opine that farmers in general and horse breeding farmers in particular will judge it to be for their advantage to have their road mare if they keep one or their plowmare if they do not of a likely kind to drop a fast wellshaped enduring foal in case they take a notion to throw her out of work for a while and see if they cant get a clever colt out of her will judge it to be to their advantage to stint her to a horso which has shown himself by proof of trial to be a sure getter of fast hardy and sound ones even if they have to pay a handful of dollars for his service more than for that of some loggy lazy swillfattened drayhorse and will judge it to be immensely to his advantage if he finds himself at the end of three or four years the owner of a young one which real ¬ izes him eight hundred or a thousand be ¬ cause he can go away down In the thirties or half as much again because he has the style pace action and speed to make a gen ¬ eral officers battle charger or a match for a pair of roundsteppers which together will command three or four thousand from a city dealerneighbor Noadvantageinspeedsour grapes to the contrary notwithstanding Now to the production of animals of the types I describe I care not which of them the blood sire is requisite and the better the blood the better I mean for its proved trans ¬ mission of speed and lasting and the more of it the better will be the foal whether he turn out a trotter a charger a hunter a roadster a carriage horse or a mere ma chineer chineerIn In whichever of these capacities lie is fitted by strength size weight bone show speed carriage and action to excel rest assured be ¬ yond the possibility of a mistake that the competitor who is precisely his equal in every other respect but his inferior in blood he will beat in lasting in coming again and in endurance of punishment by exactly so much as he does excel him in blood bloodNay Nay If he have very long to last and very often to come again particularly at high weights and in distress he may safely allow him the advantage of a superior turn of speed And those lovers and admirers of the trotting horse and depreciators of the race horse as if he were a mere toy of luxury and idleness an inciter to vain display and an accomplice in sin and scandal tacitly admit his immeasurable superiority as a pro ¬ genitor by the pains they take wherever there is the shadow of foundation for such a pretense to prove that the trotter is thoroughbred himself or at least the product of three or four pure crosses crossesFor For they well know that being shown fast in his own performances and in his blood indisputably of high thorough strain his value is multiplied tenfold Such descent is all but a guarantee that whatever else he may turn out he will not turn out a flincher or a dunghill dunghillPedigree Pedigree of trotters are rarely to be ascer ¬ tained or even approximated since they have for the most part passed through many hands and are no longer young before their powers are discovered wnen it is too late to inquire Still it is known that many and for every reason suspected that more of the best performers have been nearly if not quite thoroughbred thoroughbredOf Of this however I am prepared to treat more fully when I come to speak of trotters and the trotting turf the reason of their su ¬ perior excellence and frequency in the United States and their rarity and inferior speed in Great Britain BritainThere There is yet one branch of horsebreeding to be named and that perhaps the most important in a national point of view I mean the breeding of horses for mounting the cavalry service and in none is the use of the thoroughbred stallions as a sire so manifest as in this thisThe The requirements of cavalry service in the armies of which I write are twofold the first outpost duty making reconnaissances of wide tracts of country and skirmishing the second charging solid masses whether of infantry or horse at speed in the actual shock of battle For tne first of these duties activity rather than speed quickness hardness and endurance are the essential qualifications for the second the union of the maximum of speed with the maximum of weightcarrying capacity capacityIn In the charge of cavalry the measure of the impetus or momentum of the attacking body is that of the weight multiplied by that of the velocity of the impinging body bodyIt It is evident therefore that the heavier the body which can be propelled at a given rate against a lighter body going at the same rate or the greater the speed at which a given body can be propelled against an equal body moving at inferior speed the more powerful and certain the effect of the charge chargeIn In a word the problem given to bo an ¬ swered is how to projiel the maximum weight at the maximum speed speedThe The weight of an English trooper fully accoutred and in heavy marching order is prodigious that of a hussar or light dra goon averaging 250 pounds that of a heavy dragoon 2SO pounds and that of a life guardsman or cuirassier SOS pounds To Be Continued
