ents. All that matter about
blood and speed we won't discuss; we understand all that; useful,
very,--OF course,--great obligations to the Godolphin "Arabian,"
and the rest. I say racing horses are essentially gambling
implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am not preaching at
this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning;
but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not
republican. It belongs to two phases of society,--a cankered
over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the
reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism
of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real
Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of
government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows
out of it. This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice
or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively
quiet. But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling, and
with all its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings,--to
which I plead very susceptible,--the disguise is too thin that
covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters are
the Southern gentry,--fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans
exactly, as we understand the term,--a few Northern millionnaires
more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real
people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly
idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a
crowd, or to meet in a dark alley. In England, on the other hand,
with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth
enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes,
from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled
corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise
the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down
on his office-stool the next day without wincing.

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The
racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet
upon, as much as the thimble-rigger's "little joker." The trotter
is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for
sporting men.

What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most
cultivated and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that
the trotting horses of America beat the world? And why should we
have expected that the