It is feared that we shall lose altogether the breed of animal that is capable of such performances. For many years we have been studying to acquire increased _power_, and consequently _pace_, to the disregard of _stamina_. It stands to reason that the _larger_ a horse is, _cæteris paribus_, the _faster_ he can go; but it does not the least follow that his size should enable him to _go on_. Doubtless the object for which we get into the saddle is _dispatch_, and “the slows” is the worst disease our horse can be troubled with; nevertheless, there is a good old rule in mechanics which affirms “_nil violentum est perpetuum_;” and if your engine is to go with the weight and _momentum_ of an express train, you must calculate on a considerable expenditure of fuel, and great wear and tear on the nuts, screws, and fittings of the whole. Now, Nature, although the neatest and most finished of workers, will not submit herself to the laws of commensuration. She will not make you a model in _inches_, and supply you with a work on a corresponding scale in _feet_. It would seem as if she only issued a certain amount of stores in the aggregate, and if you are to get more iron, she gives you less steel; you shall have plenty of coke, but in return she stints you in oil. So, if the living creature she turns out for you on your estimate is to be very magnificent in its proportions, the chances are that it will either fail in activity, or be deficient in endurance.
We have now established half-mile races for our two-year-olds, as, with some few exceptions, the most important events of our English turf—our very Derbys and St. Legers—are but a scramble of a dozen furlongs, with little more than the weight of a child on a _very_ young horse’s back. With all the forcing by which art strives to expel nature, it returns, in this instance, as Horace says, literally with a stablefork,[3] we cannot get an animal to its prime at three years old, who ought not to arrive at maturity till twice that age. Still we continue to breed more and more for a “turn of speed,” utterly regardless of endurance, till our famous English racehorses have degenerated into such galloping “weeds,” that I myself heard an excellent sportsman and high authority on such matters affirm, in discussing the hounds-and-horses match, which was to have come off last October, that “he did not believe there was a horse at Newmarket that could get four miles _at all_; no, not if you trotted him every yard of the way!”
