schaft or
chivalrous caste. And they would be able to do so: because the conquered
race would not care or dare to learn the new and dangerous art. There
are persons, even in England, who can never learn to ride. There are
whole populations in Europe, even now, when races have become almost
indistinguishably mixed, who seem unable to learn. And this must have
been still more the case when the races were more strongly separated in
blood and habits. So the Teutonic chief, with his gesitha, comites, or
select band of knights, who had received from him, as Tacitus has it, the
war-horse and the lance, established himself as the natural ruler--and
oppressor--of the non-riding populations; first over the aborigines of
Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been enslaved, and their names
lost, before the time of Tacitus; and then over the non-riding Romans and
Gauls to the South and West, and the Wendish and Sclavonic tribes to the
East. Very few in numbers, but mighty in their unequalled capacity of
body and mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic
Ritterschaft literally rode roughshod over the old world; never checked,
but when they came in contact with the free-riding hordes of the Eastern
steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek
text] of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been only hints ending in
failure and absorption.

Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. The favourite, and
therefore the chosen sacrifice of Odin, their ancestor and God, the
horse's flesh was eaten at the sacrificial meal; the horse's head, hung
on the ash in Odin's wood, gave forth oracular responses. As
Christianity came in, and the eating of horse-flesh was forbidden as
impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as that
which Falada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the German tale, the
magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and legends: but his
real power remained.

The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive science--at last a
pedantry, hampered by absurd etiquettes, and worse than useless
traditions; but the power and right to ride remained on the whole the
mark of the dominant caste. Terribly did they often abuse that special
power. The faculty of making a horse carry him no more makes a man a
good man, than the faculties of making money, making speeches, making
books, or making a noise about public abuses. And of all ruffians, the
worst