Something about Horses, Sport and War H. Strickland Constable VENISON i TUFTS UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 3 9090 014 547 273 Webster FamnyUb^an^ idicmeat Cummrngs School ^ Tui North Grafton, MA 01536 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR SOMETHING ABOUT HORSES, SPORT AND WAR BY H. STRICKLAND CONSTABLE EDEN, REMINGTON & CO.. PUBLISHERS KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I89I CONTENTS PAGE Preface vii The Gospel of Recreation, . . . i The Thorough-Bred Horse, . . -14 Why is one Racehorse better than another ? 30 Roaring in Horses, 58 Preserving Foxes, . . . . -74 Something about what is called the Cruelty of Field Sports, . . 83 Sport, War and Manliness of Character, 138 PREFACE These papers, with the exception of the last, have been printed from time to time in newspapers. I now collect them together, and add another on War, with a view to shewing the great importance, from a national point of view, of culti- vating all kinds of manly sport. Jibcritt ^)0XBtB, Sport anti S^ar -4>- THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION Herbert Spencer in New York told the Americans that the gospel of work had been sufficiently preached in their country, and that the time had come when some one should preach to them the gospel of recreation. But this gospel is wanted in Great Britain amongst certain people as well as in America. Vast numbers in their passionate striving for wealth give A 2 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR themselves no time for anything else, and a large political party who call themselves ' earnest,' but really are only grim, set their faces against everything that goes by the name of sport. Doubtless, if it were not for those classes (including what Is called the aristocracy), whose character- istics come from hereditarily Independent means, sports and pastimes would hardly exist. Perhaps the first function of the hereditarily ' well to do ' and educated is to guard liberty and property against the encroachments made upon them by autocratic or democratic despotism ; the second, to keep up in the country a high standard of manners ; the third, to preach the gospel of recreation. Every one who gives a ball or concert preaches the gospel of recreation. Every- THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION 3 body who gets up a cricket match preaches it. Every man who keeps a pack of fox hounds preaches it. Any lady who gets up a musical or theatrical entertainment in a country town, or choral and concert societies in country villages, is a practical preacher of the gospel of recreation, and is a public benefactor by being so ; and practical preaching is better than verbal preaching, which goes in at one ear and out at the other; or than printed preaching which for the most part only induces sleep. Now such things as a rule can only be done by those classes with hereditarily independent means, (and thence with leisure for them,) against which classes the poor carping socialist wages his eternal war because ' they toil not neither do they spin,' to use his foolish 4 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR formula for all labour and occupation thai Is not merely muscular and manual. Every country squire who gives a school feast with games and amusements to village children Is a preacher of the gospel of recreation. In France, where democratic envy and hatred have almost destroyed the class of country squires, there hardly, as Lady Verney tells us, are such things as these village holidays. Those little centres of civilisation, the houses of the squires and better class farmers, being almost done away with In that country, civilisation seems to be getting done away with also. M. Renan says, that the lives of the little French peasant proprietors are for the most part little better than the lives of savages; lives of sordid slavery for man, woman, and THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION 5 child ; that is, if there is a child. ' La verite est.' says M. Vacherot, a French writer, about the peasant proprietor in France, ' La verite est qit il vit miserable- nient, qiL il est abritti, . . . et qjte cet etat de chose s ira en enipirant! ' If any one,' says Mr Lilly, 'wishes to know the truth about the lives of French peasant proprietors let him read I\I. Zola's " La Terre." He will not be amused, for the book is deadly dull. But he w^ill find a gallery of photographs the substantial accuracy of which appears to be beyond serious question. The French peasant will stand revealed in all the repulsiveness of actual life; avaricious, penurious, dishonest, tyrannical, foul ; sunk in a depravation which one hardly likes to call bestial : it is unfair to the beasts.' So much for a state 6 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR of society where the gospel of recreation is never preached because there are no classes to preach it. Everybody who helps to give all classes in a country town an out-of-door holiday by means of a race meeting preaches the gospel of recreation. It is no objection to say that abuses attend some of these forms of recreation, for abuses attend every earthly thing. The only way to escape them is to become a Buddhist lunatic, who we are told sits in one place ' with his eyes fixed on his navel waiting for Nirvana or the great white light ; ' this state when reached, meaning in fact a state of idiotcy. The only way completely to escape evil is to think nothing, to feel nothing, to believe nothing and to do nothing — to be, in fact, morally, intellectually, spiritually, and THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION 7 actually, an agnostic ; that is to say a dead man. Once Introduce human life, action, thought and opinions and beliefs, at the same time error and evil are introduced Inasmuch as errorlessness In thought, word or deed is not for man. The Member of Parliament who pro- poses to adjourn the ' House ' for ' the Derby,' preaches the gospel of recreation. He who opposes It preaches the gospel of grimness. The former will usually be of the genial, well-conditioned type ; the latter will usually be a ' sour ' socialist of the carping, 111 - conditioned kind ; and which of these two types is the best? ' Joyous- ness Is the mother of all virtues ' Goethe's mother used to say. If this is true what will grim, carping, envious discontent be the mother of .-^ One of these joyless re- creation-haters In America brought an action against Barnum the showman for causing danger to hfe and Hmb by en- couraging bicycle races. Of course the case ended in Barnum's favour, who then offered the bringer of the action 200 dollars a month if he would join his show and be exhibited as a specimen Idiot ; I am afraid we have a good many idiots of the kind in England. ' It requires,' says Carlyle, ' a certain vigour of the Imagination and of the social instincts before amusements and popular sports can exist. No doubt as time goes on, America will acquire larger classes of men such as England possesses, who will see to these things. ' The upper classes,' says Mr G. Harwood, ' are mixed up with those associations of sport and enjoyment THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION 9 which are so dear to the hearts of the masses of Englishmen. The Middle Classes have made the mistake of being too grim.' ' We need not,' again says Mr Harwood, ' dislike a man whose thoughts are not our thoughts ; but we can hardly help it if he is also grimly self-righteous and persistently dull.' Thus we see how it is that different classes are necessary for every country before it can be called civilised or highly developed from brute- like barbarism. Grimness is sometimes religious (so called) sometimes political. But the re- ligion of grimness is not Christianity. Christianity is the gospel of glad tidings, because instead of the old religions that teach the negative commandments not to do wrong on pain of suffering, Christianity lo HORSES, SPORT AND WAR teaches the positive doctrines oi life, that is, happiness and active dehght In all that is good and beautiful. Instead of the old religions that believed In the world being ruled by cruel demons, Christianity teaches that creation Is beneficent, and that ' all things work together for good ' to those that act according to the will of God as discovered by studying nature. Chris- tianity is the religion of faith, hope, love, energy and life, — all the joyous activities, virtues and qualities. ' The world,' says F. Robertson, ' has only two remedies for the Instability and transltorlness of human affections. Some shut out the recollection and are merry like Charles II. Some dwell on It and are sad. The Christian dwells on it and is happy.' THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION n The selfish, the sensual, the merely an- alytic and critical, and the grim cannot ex- perience this joy, so they disbelieve in there being such a thing. Goethe says that ' a man is of import- ance In proportion as he is happy himself and makes others happy.' The grim creature, so common amongst purely industrial people, who scorns recre- ation sees no good in anything that is not merely necessary or what he calls useful, and who worships republican sim- plicity, of course holds forth against sport In all forms, as well as against all the beauty and joyousness of life. ^ We ' said Heine (who was an advanced democrat) ' are fighting not for the rights of the people but for the divine rights of humanity. In this, and In much else, we 12 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR differ from the men of the Revolution. We do not wish to be sans-culottlsts, nor frugal citizens, nor unassuming presidents. You demand simple modes of dress and unsplced pleasures. We, on the contrary, desire nectar, ambrosia, purple mantles, costly perfumes, luxury and splendour, dances of laughing nymphs, music, and comedies. Be not therefore angry with us, virtuous Republicans ! To your cen- sorious reproaches we reply in the words of Shakespeare's character, * Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale ? ' Thus we see, that, though he puts It In his peculiar manner, Heine had no love for grimness and Republican simplicity. Shakespeare and Heine, of course, used the word ' virtuous ' Ironically. What THE GOSPEL OF RECREATION 13 they meant was narrow and sour people who condemn the sports, recreations and joys of human Hfe. THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE In an excellent letter by Mr G. Lascelles, that was lately printed in several news- papers, he states that all the merit there is in hunters and hackneys comes from the thorough-bred crosses in them — that is to say, the crosses of racing blood. This is true. Racing has been a favourite sport of the English for a thousand years. ^ Horse racing,' says Strutt in his ' Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,' * existed in Athelstan's reign.' We read THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 15 of races at Smithfield In the year 1154. All this tune the English, whilst for the most part thinking only of amusement, have been Improving the breed of horses for all sorts of quick work, — the word ' Improvement ' meaning Increase of pace, of endurance, and of the true, smooth action that brings surefootedness. These qualities come from the admixture of African, Arabian, Spanish, and other southern blood, combined with centuries of competition In speed, developing that make and shape which demands least use- less expenditure of muscular and nervous energy. Good thorough-bred horses have also lost what goes by the name of ' lumber ' — such as lumps of fiesh and fat, that under-bred horses have on the top of the neck. Racing has created the power- 1 6 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ful thorough-bred hunter, such as Minting, as well as the thick, short-legged hackney, such as Daniel O'Rourke, the winner of the Derby in 1852. I am afraid it is true that popular taste condemns the thorough-bred make and shape. Its ideal rather is, head up, tail up, knees up, and heavy-crested neck, each to an exaggerated degree. There is the same difference between popular and true taste everywhere. Uncultivated taste prefers ' nigger minstrels ' to Beethoven, and generally things that are meretricious, tawdry, and exaggerated, and therefore ugly, to things that are really beautiful. I am afraid there is no doubt that our poor friend ''Arry ' (with whom M}- Pnnch has made us so well acquainted), who loves everything that the Americans call THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 17 ' loud,' and who never can see merit In the beauty, efficiency, and quiet strength that comes from the absence of all that is forced, exaggerated, and unsymmetrical — I say I am afraid that our friend ' 'Arry,' when he goes to the Islington Horse Show takes the popular view. The best judges of horses 1 have ever known were, perhaps, the late Sir Tatton Sykes and the late Sir George Cholmley. Good judges are not so common as it Is supposed. To be a first-rate judge of a horse requires an artistic eye for form that is rare. Sir Tatton used to say that, though often applied to, he would never recommend anyone as a judge at horse shows in his district, because amongst those who would undertake the thing, he only knew one man who was a good l8 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR enough judge, and he was such a rogue that he would never do. One objection sometimes made to thorough-bred horses Is that they do not carry their heads high enough. I re- member Sir Tatton saying, that he had rather his horse carried his head too low than too high. Sir G. Cholmley agreed with him. Sir George was lame half his life In consequence of a broken leg from a fall out hunting ; but he always said that a far worse accident was concussion of the brain from riding a horse which carried his head too high, and when toss- ing It hit him on the forehead and nearly killed him. Sir Tatton seldom praised a horse with- out adding ' there Is no lumber about him,' THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 19 meaning that there was no unnecessary weight about his neck. Sir George Cholmley was always laugh- ing at what I have described as the popular Idea of a horse, and used to draw caricatures of the creature, writing underneath ' A Frenchman's Idea of a horse,' or a ' woman's Idea of a horse.' He was fond of telling about a foreigner with whom he became acquainted In Italy, giving him a commission to buy a horse for him. The animal was to be ' bai dord avec la queiie placde hatU, le cou grand et haiit, et les genoux dldves ires Jia2tt en t rot t ant.' He cared for nothing but these things. A common Idea, natural to a child or anyone without knowledge on the matter, is that a horse with high action will never 20 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR fall on a road. There cannot be a greater mistake. I once had a handsome half- bred grey mare with very high knee action. She seldom tripped, but when she trod on a stone or put her foot into a rut down she would come. She broke her knees about once a year. On the other hand, a thorough-bred horse I hunted many years had too low action, so he sometimes tripped. But he stepped true, quick and forward, so when he tripped, his other leg was on the spot in the right place, and he never fell on the road in his life. I hunted him till he was old — he was a perfect hunter. Amongst minor evils, high action will cause splints speedy-cuts and other un- soundnesses. The moral of this letter is, that if a THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 21 man wants to be carried or pulled in a carriage safely, smoothly, quickly, and enduringly, he should use horses that are either thorough-bred, or with so many crosses that it practically comes to much the same thing. During many years the best rider to hounds on the east side of Yorkshire was the Rev. J. Bowser. He was a tall man, and rode, perhaps, nearly fourteen stone. Latterly he only rode thorough-breds. He used to say to me, ' Of course, you may blow a thorough-bred in deep ground just like any other horse ; but he soon comes round, and is as fresh as ever. Even when blown he will get over his fence where a blown under-bred horse would fall, and he will come home merrily after the hardest day.' ' If my hunting life were to begin 22 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR again, I have heard him say, ' I would never ride anything, either as hack or hunter, but thorough-breds.' Thorough-breds can, as we all know, be bred strong enough to carry more than fifteen stone to hounds. The horse that is best for hunting is best for army work. There have been proposals to admit as candidates at shows, hunting stallions not quite thorough-bred. If this were done, fraud, false pedigrees, vulgar shapes, lumber and our friend ''Arry' would be- fore long have it all their own way, and we should after a time have nothing in the country to ride and drive but under-bred animals — 'avec le cou grand et haul et les genoux dUves tres Iiatit en trottant! At present the Stud book is a safeguard against fraud. THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 23 That magnificent animal, a thorough- bred horse, such as Stockwell, or King Tom, or Minting, capable of carrying a a man sixteen stone in weight is a new creation in the world. He is created by racing. If it had not been for racing we should all still be riding the kind of thick- shouldered weak, heavy, clumsy brute Charles I is unceasingly trotting, to the great peril of his neck, down Parliament Street from Charing Cross. But we have, as I say, by racing created a new animal, and all nations come to England to buy him as well as the mares and sires to breed him. If for any reason the competition in racing were to diminish, deterioration in pace, beauty, symmetry, safety and endur- ance would at once set in. Nothing else could take the place of that ' proof of the 24 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR pudding ' racing. Farm and dray horses apart, the admixture of thorough-bred or racing blood has very much increased the pace and efficiency of all horses, from the butcher's hack to Minting. By how much has this increased pace and efficiency added to the national wealth ? In business ' time is money.' Many well - meaning people who are, perhaps, a little weak in the mind con- demn and would put down racing, because abuses attend it. But abuses attend every earthly thing. They might just as well say that nobody should be on the Stock Exchange, on account of the gambling that goes on there. A racing man, who lived by betting, had a confederate. One day he found out that this friend of his was in the habit of gambling on the Stock THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 25 Exchange. Upon this he, much shocked, at once dissolved the partnership. He said a Hne must be drawn somewhere, and that was where he drew it. GambHng Is universal. No country is without it, though, perhaps, England has less than most. If people must gamble an out-of-door form of the thing is doubtless best. Re- move It compulsorlly from race courses and, perhaps, the only effect would be to drive it to the hells in towns. The Chinese are, perhaps, the most Inveterate o^amblers in the world. China o abounds In gambling hells. A Chinaman, w^hen he has lost everything else, will stake his finger joints ; if he loses, he chops a joint off with a hatchet, dips the stump in oil, and resumes play ; if he loses 26 again he chops off another joint, and so on, till all are gone. He will also gamble on his clothing till he has not a scrap left ; then, having nothing else to loose, he is driven out by his companions, who (if in winter) watch him with great glee from the window, crouching first against one corner of a house, that he hopes will afford some warmth, then against another, till at last he lies down and dies, when his com- panions with hilarious ' yah yah's ' return to their game. I think our English forms of gambling are better than the Chinese forms, but perhaps this is only because I am an Englishman. No doubt the Chinese think their ways the best. Short-sighted people think the way to morality is to put down by law all pursuits THE THOROUGH-BRED HORSE 27 that may lead to immorality. Thus in some parts of America they put down all public houses because people get drunk in them. But statistics show that more people got drunk than ever. Herbert Spencer says that legislation, contrary to the natural course of things, if left alone generally acts in the long run in ways contrary to that intended by the foolish legislator. Here is an illustration to show how putting down all gambling by law might possibly work in the long run. Weak charactered people ruin them- selves by gambling, and when they have done this kill themselves with drinking. This may be one of nature's ways of eliminating the weak or pernicious part of a population. ' Casting them out into outer darkness,' as the Bible expresses 28 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR the thing in its oriental phraseology, or again, ' Cut down the unfruitful fig tree, why cumbereth it the ground.' But a grandmotherly government tries to prop up for a time the poor imbecile creature by taking all temptation to gamble or drink out of his 'reach. But this makes no difference in his character or rather negation of character. He lives long enough to marry and have a family. But the children of weak people are as a rule weak too — weaker still indeed than their parents. So the only effect of the despotic and compulsory legislation is to fill the country fuller than ever with weak charactered people — with people who are morally fools, however clever they may be in mere wits. But a great and prosperous country means a country where the in- THE THOROUGFI-BRED HORSE 29 dividual persons of which it is composed have strength of character, that is to say strength for self-control, wisdom and honesty. The business of legislation is to punish sins against public order, not to put down everything that may lead to these sins being committed, for that means meddling everywhere. It means hampering free human life and independent strength everywhere. It means discouraging the exercise of all human energies ; that is to say it means encouraging everywhere inactivity, helpless dependence, imbecility of character, want of self-control, indolence and thence vice of every kind, inasmuch as all vice means at bottom weakness or the negation of some strength. WHY IS ONE RACEHORSE BETTER THAN ANOTHER? * One horse beats another,' says A, ' be- cause he has more crosses of Whalebone blood ; ' says B, ' Because he has more crosses of Herod blood;' says C, ' Because he has more crosses of Blacklock blood ; ' says D, ' For no reason at all ; they run in all shapes, and with any crosses.' Admiral Rous said the same as D, and that therefore racehorse breeding was a lottery. He said that the best bred horse he ever knew was the slowest he ever THE RACEHORSE 31 tried, that some of the best mares he ever knew bred nothing that could win a race, and some of the 'jadiest' mares bred the stoutest horses. ' Speedy jady mares,' he says, ' are animals that have bred nine- tenths of the best and stoutest racehorses, Plenipotentiary, Orlando, Venison, Pero Gomez, and a hundred others I could name, and the most extraordinary mares, Plover, Violante, Camarino, Virago never bred a horse worth ^300.' What does Mr Matthew Dawson say ? ' You probably agree,' said his inter- viewer, ' in the doctrine of breeding from certain strains of blood ? ' ' Not at all,' answered the great trainer. ' The con- formation of the mares is of far more importance than their special descent, despite fanciful theories of crosses and so 32 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR on. The produce of good animals of any thorough-bred strain has a fair chance of turning out well. It is of far greater importance that the sire and dam should be good specimens of racehorses than that they should be of any so-called fashionable strain. Robert the Devil, St Gatien, two of the best horses of recent years were, what Is called, unfashionably bred.' To these he might have added Barcaldine, Foxhall, and a host of others. I need not say that Mr Dawson is a clever man, with great experience, whose opinion therefore is valuable. The inter- viewer finished by saying, ' I am to con- clude, then, that much nonsense Is talked about the Turf?' 'Yes,' said Mr Dawson, * as about everything else.' ' And the nonsense is talked,' said Rous, ' because THE RACEHORSE 33 there are many to swallow It. I once,' he said, ' heard a marine and a sailor arguing about the meaning of the word ''epicure." It was decided In favour of Jack, who asserted that, ^' an epicure was a beggar that would eat anything." Such,' said the Admiral, ' is the British public' I cannot resist the temptation of giving the last Instance I have come across of the nonsense that Is supplied to the vor- acious maw of the British public. The writer who describes the horses in a well got up book with sixty portraits, called ' History of celebrated English and French thorough-bred stallions,' describing the coarse hocks of one of the French horses says, ^ many good judgxs attributed to this his extreme irritability of temper.' c 34 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Can anything be funnier than the Idea of bad temper In a horse being caused by crooked hind legs ? I need hardly say that bad temper In a horse alzuays comes either from the bad mangement of grooms or by Inheritance' from some badly man- aged ancestors. It Is the fashion of the clay to recom- mend ' In-and-in ' breeding. But, to say nothing else against it, Darwin has proved that It ends In sterility. Now, a foal not being bred ' In - and - In,' Is perhaps all wrong, but, after all, It may be better than Its not being bred at all. Darwin shows that close ' In - and - In ' breeding leads to diminished vitality, and loss of constitu- tional vigour in those that do come Into the world. Mr J. Day, In his excellent books THE RACEHORSE 35 about racing, condemns ' in-and-in ' breed- ing. ' Race horse breeding is a lottery,' said Rous. Now ' a lottery ' or ' chance ' means ignorance of cause. ' It chanced to be fine yesterday,' means the causes why it did not rain are unknown. ' A horse happens by chance to be a good one,' means that we do not know the causes that prevented his being a bad one. But people dislike saying they do not under- stand a thing, so they extract explanations out of their inner consciousness ; hence theories about ' in-and-in breeding,' Whale- bone crosses, Herod crosses, etc. etc. Breeding good horses is not altogether a lottery, inasmuch as sensible people know that good shapes have very much, if not everything, to do with it. It is a 36 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR common saying amongst racing men that horses run in all shapes, and therefore make and shape are nothing. Colonel Anson, a racing man, was chaffing the late Sir Tatton Sykes about being ' a make and shape man.' ' But,' said Sir Tatton, ' you are your- self a make and shape man.' ' How do you make that out ? ' asked the Colonel. ' Because if you had the choice of buy- ing one of two colts, equal to each other in breeding and in all other respects, you would buy the one whose make and shape were best.' Colonel Anson could not deny it. There are many like him, who proclaim aloud that make and shape are nothing, and forthwith go and buy the best made colt they can find. THE RACEHORSE 37 I'he difference between a first and second class race horse will often depend on differences in make and shape (only perhaps an inch here and an inch there) that cannot be decerned by the eye, — at any-rate, not by most eyes. That horses run well in all shapes is completely untrue. Though there have been good horses with bad shoulders like Lanercost or Whalebone, with bad legs like Velocipede, with calf knees like the Flying Dutchman and Whisker, with bad loins like Bay Middleton, with upright pasterns like Blacklock, with long and loose pasterns like Rataplan, with a broad chest like Plenipotentiary with a narrow chest like Peregrine, with turned out toes like Vespasian, with turned in toes like Wheel of Fortune, with deep fore ribs like 38 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Tristan, with shallow fore ribs like Venison, long and low like Melton, short and high like Lowlander, still the great proportions, as for instance, between the hind and fore- quarters, or between the ends and middle piece, nmst be truly balanced. If a horse has too small a girth for his size he will be deficient in lung and heart capacity. If too large he will be top-heavy and good for little. Symmetry is everything. Action and all good things come from it, though there must be a certain degree of power, or weight will be felt too much. There must also be a certain limit to size on the one hand, and compactness on the other. Neither a horse seventeen hands nor one under fifteen hands is ever first class. Experience seems to show that about the mean, between these measurements is, as a THE RACEHORSE 39 rule, the best. Some horses are speedy, some are stayers ; but it will be all in the make and shape if we only had eyes to see it. One of the best living judges of a racehorse I know tells me he has observed that good stayers are apt to be somewhat narrower to follow than the speedy ones for a short distance. Blood in these days is so mixed that it is easy to talk plausibly about four or more crosses of Whalebone blood being neces- sary, or some other such fancy ; but to bring one of these theories to anything like proof would require careful analysis of the breeding and performances of all horses that are trained, and then some mathe- matical demonstrations carried out in the doctrine of chances. But what theorisers do this ? Given their way of proving a 40 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR case, I could prove anything whatever — as, for instance, that four crosses of white hairs in the tail will make a first class race horse. When a man gets an idea into his head he often rides it to death, and can see no other. But truth means the balance of all ideas. There is much lottery, or chance, in breeding ; but it is not all chance, as Rous said. He said that good horses breed bad ones, but they are rather less likely to do so than others equally well shaped to the eyes of the merely average good judge. On the other hand, the idea that only the best performers can sire a good race horse is very much exaggerated. According to Admiral Rous, in pro- portion to the numbers of unfashionably- THE RACEHORSE 41 bred ones born and well trained they win as many races as those that are fashionably-bred. Archbishop Whateley was fond of composing and propounding riddles. One day he asked, ' Why do white sheep eat more than black ones.^' After listening to sundry answers, as, for instance, that black sheep absorbing more caloric require less food, the Archbishop said, ' No, the reason is that there are more of them.' So we may ask why do the progeny of celebrated and fashionable horses win more races than those of less known ones ? Then will come answers about their having more Whalebone blood in them, or some such guess. Then comes the answer, ' Because there are more of them.' More are born, more are trained. Fewer are bought to go abroad 42 PIORSES, SPORT AND WAR and be no more heard of. Besides this the fastest mares (that Is, the best-shaped ones) go to them, and the progeny having cost more, get Into the best training stables. I have seen It stated that Touchstone sired nearly thirty foals every year till he was thirty years old. I myself do not doubt that good race- horses with a string of Illustrious ancestors are more likely to breed successfully than others that are to most eyes equally well shaped. That, however, will not be from some imaginary mystic quality In the blood, but from the extra good make and shape which the average human eye Is not acute enough to discern. Some of the most successful sires for many years have been Whalebone, Touch- stone, Newmlnster, Irish BIrdcatcher, THE RACEHORSE 43 Stockwell and Roslcruclan. Connected doubtless with this success is the fact that each of these horses had an own brother about as good as himself, this showing that he was not a mere accident- ally good horse — that is, an accidentally true-shaped one. One or two instances of what a correct eye for form will do : One January, many, many years ago, a man went over John Scott's stables at Malton. When he came away, after having looked at all the horses (a great number), he said, ' The one I liked best was a two-year-old by Mel- bourne.' This colt was afterwards known as West Australian, and was the best horse of his day. But at the time he had never been tried or heard of. Does this look as if make and shape are nothing "^ 44 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR One day this same man went to see the breeding establishment at Hampton Court. Walking about the fields, he came across a mare and a foal. After looking for a bit at the foal, he said, ' That foal Is by Melbourne.' Looking again at It, he said, ' No, It Is by Touchstone.' Just then the stud groom came up, and said that the foal was by Touchstone out of Canezou by Melbourne. I have heard even good judges of horses say that no one can tell anything about a foal, they are so much alike, but true eyes with experience will do wonders. If there are thirty varieties of a plant, some gardeners will tell anyone of these varieties from seeing only one leaf, whereas to ordinary eyes the leaves of all the varieties are exactly alike. THE RACEHORSE 45 Disposition in racehorses does not show much. Lazy ones, Hke Lanercost or Rataplan, are sometimes first-class, as are also hot-tempered ones like Galopin. Some horses, again, are more nervous than others, but this only means that they require more patience and gentle- ness. They are more easily spoilt by the whip. If flogged when doing their best, next time they won't even try to do their best, and quite right too. Set a good cart horse to pull a weight that he can't pull, and he will do his best. When satisfied that it is too much for him, he won't try again however cruelly he may be flogged. Then give him instead something that he can pull, and he won't even try, especially if he sees a whip flourished. Many a cart horse has been 46 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR spoiled in this way. So it is with race horses. Some years ago Fred Archer was about to ride a nervous hot tempered mare called 'Alone.' Mr Milner, her owner, asked the jockey to leave his whip behind. Archer objected. Mr Milner offered him an extra five pounds to do so. Archer consented to this arrangement and won the race. On the other hand, there undoubtedly is here and there a horse that whether he has been llogged or not can run but won't. He is usually called a sulky pig of a horse. But instead of bad temper the thing more often comes from good temper, like many a man who is ' lazy and good-natured and averse to exerting^ himself.' The mare 'Alone' was too nervous. The horse I am describ- ing is not nervous and timid enough. Not THE RACEHORSE 47 having the fear of his rider that he ought to have when he gets amongst strange horses in a race, he pays more attention to them than to the heels and hands of his jockey. But here again far more can be done by clever management than seems generally to be thought. What such a horse wants is a double or treble amount of break- ing in to make him handy and obedient. During the winter months he should be constantly sent out with fox-hounds, so as to accustom him to crowds. The object should be to make him as handy and obedient as an old hunter. He should be ridden too by himself. It takes a long time to make horses handy and obedient with nothing but walking and galloping In a row one after another like a flock of geese. Every young half-broken horse Is difficult 48 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR to get on unless there is another In front of him. But the lazy ones require most time. Many a good animal is condemned as ' a pig of a horse ' when all that is wanted is time, patience and intelligence. Indeed the lazy horses are often the stoutest. The animal I have been describing is more often a horse than a mare. Sex has to do with the matter. Therefore blinkers will sometimes be useful when they are raced. As I have said, a horse of the lazy kind takes longer to teach obedience to the hands and heels of his rider, than those of a more nervous and lively dis- position. If spurred, perhaps, he will kick. I once saw a half broken hunter ridden at a fence and spurred for the first time in his life. He evidently thought it meant THE RACEHORSE 49 that he was to turn round, with his tail to the fence and kick. So kick he did, steadily and conscientiously, for five minutes. This started the habit, and, after that, he kicked whenever he was put at a fence, whether spurred or not. He was soon sold for being a vicious devil. But It was not the horse that was a devil, but the man that was a fool. Every horse has gradually to be taught that being spurred means, not that he Is to kick, but that he Is to go quicker. A young horse, when whipped or spurred, must do something. He will kick, or rear, or bolt, or do one of, say, twenty things, going forwards being one of them. Thus, If he Is untaught, the odds are nine- teen to one against his doing the right thing ; and, yet. If he does one of the D 50 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR nineteen wrong ones, he Is called an ill- tempered brute. A two-year old being touched with a spur, In a race, bolted into some bushes. ' He has gone bird-nesting,' said Sir John Astley, taking down his glasses. In fact, bird-nesting was one of the above nineteen wrong things to do instead of the one right one. And why not ? He had never been taught not to go bird-nesting, so how was he to know ? Has a horse a bad trick or habit? Then he has been badly managed. The trainer or breaker will talk of inborn vice, — what theologians call ' original sin,' and, of course, some horses have hereditary bad tendencies. But what does a clever breaker like Mr Galvayns care for them in a young horse.'* He just takes a little more time than usual THE RACEHORSE 5 1 and always overcomes the ' original sin.' Cleverness In the management of young horses comes from the power to look at things from the horse's point of view, just as Browning, the poet, had the power by means of his imagination, of looking at life from Caliban's point of view. Why horse breakers and trainers do not exercise more than they do this power of looking at things from the horse's point of view, Is very strange, especially when w^e consider that It Is not at all an unusual thing to find some of them who seem to have no difficulty whatever in looking upon things from an ass's point of view. Much of Mr Galvayne's success comes from his power of looking at things from the young horse's point of view. Horses of the hot-tempered, nervous 52 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR kinds will, if they have never been flogged, generally do their best at the end of a race without the whip. But for those of the lazy kind a sharp cut or two at the right time will be useful. All the difficulties with racehorses and their tempers comes from their not being broken in. Indeed, how can a horse learn if he never moves without another in front of it. If touched with a spur in the middle of a race, he perhaps, as we have seen, stops to kick a bit. But who ever heard of a well-trained hunter stopping in the middle of a run to kick a bit if touched with a spur. The fact is, the old hunter is broken in and so has learnt that spurring means that he is to go on, not to kick, nor to bolt off at a tangent, nor to play THE RACEHORSE 53 Other antics of half-broken and badly broken racehorses. A Yorkshire horse-breaker will take an untouched four year old colt and have him better broken In in two months than many a young tacehorse is in two years, although the latter has the advantage of youth. The younger an animal is the more teachable he is. But then the horse breaker never follows another horse, for this only teaches the young one not to go on when he has not got another to follow, besides leading to other manifesta- tions of what is stupidly called ' temper.' If I were a trainer I would never allow a young horse to follow another except In his gallops. Of course such a system would give more trouble. But then It would pay In the end, Inasmuch as a vast 54 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR number of races are lost solely from rawness or horses not being thoroughly broken in. To return to ' make and shape.' Formerly, if anything happened that was incomprehensible, people accounted for it by the equally incomprehensible word ' witchcraft.' Then they understood all about it. In these days if a horse runs better than another that to their eyes is equally well made, people explain the thing by saying that it is in consequence of some mystic quality (nothing whatever to do with symmetry), that they call 'running strain' or by some such term. Thus they escape having to confess that they do not understand the thing. A horse stays well. In the teeth of the statement of Admiral Rous, with his THE RACEHORSE 55 vast experience, that the 'jadiest' mares will breed the stoutest horses, the fact is explained by the term ' staying blood.' But what do people mean by this term ? What makes the good stayers stay well ? It is not, they say, make and shape; then what is it ? But doubtless most of those who use the term do not think further about the matter. Having got their expression 'stout blood,' though it explains nothing, they are satisfied, like the Brob- dignags, who could not make out what Gulliver was. At length one of their scientists gave him a name and called him the ' Ramplum Scalcatch.' Then they were satisfied, and thought they knew all about the matter, though, in fact, they knew no more than before. Give a name to an incomprehensible thing, and some 56 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR people at once look on it as a compre- hensible thing. One strange, but, I believe, not un- common notion is that there is difference between descent on the male and on the female side. My advice to yearling buyers would be as follows : — Think first of make, shape, and sufficient power. Secondly, give due regard to the performances of the later fore-fathers and fore - mothers. Thirdly, discard all thoughts about in-and-in breed- ing, or about crosses of some fancy horse like Whalebone or Herod that lived a hundred years ago, more or less. Fourthly, buy yearlings with good legs. Bad legged horses are sometimes good performers, but, as a rule, they do not stand training well, and whatever their own successes THE RACEHORSE 57 they fail more or less as sires. Fifthly, never buy a ve^y fat yearling, for nobody on earth can tell its make and shape. Sixthly, if you were not born with a correct eye for form and proportion don't buy yearlings at all. Get somebody else to do it for you. ROARING IN HORSES Mr William Day has written a book entitled ' The horse : how to breed and rear him.' There is much useful matter in it where he trusts to his own experience — besides this there are reminiscences about celebrated animals, that will be amusing to lovers of the thorough-bred horse — but some of his opinions will not be accepted by all, and, his logic and infer- ences, are occasionally at fault. For instance, he says that no horse or mare, with roaring in his or her strain, should be ROARING IN HORSES 59 bred from. But blood In these days is so infinitely mixed that the blood of some ancestral roarer is In the veins of every thorough-bred horse that is foaled. Thus, to be logical, Mr Day would have people discontinue race-horse breeding. Again, in one place, he mentions Pocahontas as one of those roaring mares that should never have been bred from ; whilst In another place he says that the three best strains of blood to breed from are those of Touchstone, Voltigeur, and Stockwell, the last of these being the son of the roaring Pocahontas. Thus, according to Mr W. Day : ( i ) We should not breed from an animal that has a roaring ancestor ; (2) We shoitld breed from an animal that has a roaring ancestor. Again, at page 191 Mr Day tells us to 6o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR breed from little horses, that stand about fifteen hands one or two inches, Inasmuch as they make the most successful sires. But In some other places he tells us that the three best sires that ever lived have* been Stockwell, Voltlgeur and Touchstone ; Voltlgeur, having been a horse sixteen hands high, ' with power to carry fourteen stone to hounds, whilst Stockwell was nearly sixteen hands two Inches high, and with power to carry nearly seventeen stone to hounds. But these are, perhaps, ' slips of the pen.' On the other hand, the bulk of Mr Day's book Is excellent. Nothing can be better than the way he insists upon It, that we should keep horses In very cool and sweet stables, If we wish to escape coughs, colds and roaring. ' Where,' he says, ' stables are hot, the horses will ROARING IN HORSES 6l appear with coats like satin and full of flabby fat (engendered by heat), often mis- taken for muscle.' Again, he says, 'the satin coats ensure unbounded praise from superficial observers, but few know the many diseases that go along with them. If horses,' he says, 'feel cold, don't shut the windows, but put on more clothing.' Again, ' health is better than glossy coats without health.' Then he quotes West Australian, when he won the Leger in a canter, as being in the highest condition, but ' looking like a bag of bones covered with hair like a badger.' Hot stables are, in fact, the root of evils without end, from slight colds to death. Mr Day says ' the racehorse with the most glossy coat is least seen in public' He is in fact continually amiss in one way 62 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR or another. Of course a coat cannot be too glossy where the gloss is got in a legitimate way, that is, by good grooming. Mr Day only wages war on that extra degree of glossy coat that can only be got by too hot stables. Again Mr Day says truly in the teeth of common opinion ' remove a horse from a cold place to one much warmer and the result will be that he will cough. Take him from a warm to a cold one and this is not the case.' I give these instances to show that Mr Day is a man who can observe accurately and think for himself, and is not a mere parrot or mouthpiece of popular foolish- nesses like so many even clever writers. Now for a few words about roaring, beginning with a few facts. ROARING IN HORSES 63 1. Roaring is caused by a minute im- pediment in the windpipe that comes generally, or always, after a cold or illness of some kind, perhaps slight, and there- fore not noticed. 2. Though illness may leave any horse ' wrong in the wind,' the smaller the animal the less likely he is to become so, a pony seldom being a roarer. 3. A horse with big ends and small middle-piece is more likely to become a roarer than a horse with a good middle- piece, and thence a good constitution. 4. Sir Bevys and Charibert, both roarers, but moderate-sized, truly built horses, with good constitutions, have rarely if ever sired roarers. 5. Prince Charlie, seventeen hands high and with a long neck, sired roarers. 64 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR 6. Melbourne was a big, roaring horse, with a long neck and long back. Those of his stock that took after himself in conformation were proverbially apt to roar. Those, like West Australian and Blink Bonny, that were compactly made animals, were sound themselves and bred sound horses. 7. Angelus was an enormously powerful horse with more ends than middle-piece. He got every prize he tried for at shows, was always passed sound by the ' Vets,' and after two or three seasons was sold to the King of Italy for ^800. But he left many a roarer behind him. 8. Marcian was a beautiful little horse, but a bad roarer. He was the most popular country stallion in the neighbour- hood of Mai ton for many years and the ROARING IN HORSES 65 country was full of his stock. I rode several of them and never heard of one that was wrong in the wind. 9. Turn a pony into a foldyard with nothing to eat but straw and a turnip or two a day, and he will keep well through the winter in consequence of his having the constitution of a pony. Treat an enormous horse like Prince Charlie in this way, and he will probably be dead before March. His blood having such a long distance to travel, his animal heat and vitality are, compared with those of the pony, low. 10. Ponies are longer lived than big horses, from having healthier, hardier constitutions. Facts like these might be multiplied without limit, but I will give no more. E 66 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR A clever Frenchman once said that the secret of boring people Is to say all there Is to be said about a thing, or, as he put It, ' Le sec7'et denmtyei^ est de to2it dire' Now for necessary Inferences from these facts. They are as follows : — 1. The tendency to roar Is not a matter of heredity, but of conforma- tion, and thence constitution, though of course. If enormous size or a bad constitution is inherited, the tendency to roar will indirectly be inherited also. 2. Whilst every horse or pony dur- ing the time Its throat Is choked up, and nerves paralysed by strangles is a roarer, the Injuries, if he has a pony- like constitution, will generally recover, but if the animal has weak asslmilat- ROARING IN HORSES 67 iiig and recuperative power, he will probably never become sound again. My object In writing this Is to per- suade farmers, If they wish to avoid breeding roarers, In the first place, never to breed from a horse with a conformation Indicative of a bad con- stitution, whether the animal happens to roar himself or not ; and In the second place, not to be afraid of breeding from a horse even though a roarer, If his size Is not Immoderate, If his middle-piece Is good and neck not too long nor heavy, Inasmuch as such a horse is no more likely to sire roarers than the soundest-winded animal of his size In the world. This is going on the idea that our agricultural friend can draw correct Inferences. It is true that 68 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR many years ago a Yorkshire farmer of the old school, who could neither read nor write, when asked If he could draw an Inference, said, 'Well, I've an awld draught mare as can draw anything In reason. What Is It you said wanted drawing ? ' But farmers In these days are very different men. Still, of course, there are some people In all classes of life who seem to be quite without the reasoning faculty. Stockwell was a big horse, about 16-2 In height, and he did not for his size sire many roarers ; but his neck was short, and his middle-piece, or health apparatus, was very great. Mr Hume Webster has bought Sir Bevys in spite of his roaring. He has done wisely. ROARING IN HORSES 69 I wonder why we are never told that broken knees are inherited, as they undoubtedly are, just in the same sense that roaring is inherited, that is in- directly. The bad shoulders that lead to broken knees are inherited just as the great size and bad constitution that lead to roaring are inherited. The latest teaching of science tells us that a peculiarity acquired during one lifetime is never inherited. This is the teaching of Mr Galton, Professor Weis- man. Professor Wallace and others. If this is true, roaring cannot be inherited, for nobody ever suggested that our roarers are foaled roarers. I have had great experience as a horse breeder, but though I have known strangles or dis- temper of some kind leave a yearling 70 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR wrong in the wind, I never knew or heard of a young sucking foal that roared. Roaring is very disagreeable to hear, but the practical evil of it is in a general way not so great as some think. Donovan, Ossian, Seabreeze, Dutch Oven, Ormonde, Kilwarlin (winners of the St Leger.) Prince Charlie (second for that race), and Couronne de Fer (second in the Derby) were according to rumour ' wrong in the wind.' The records state that Eclipse also was a roarer or ' high-blower,' as the term was in his day, the word ' roarer ' not having yet been applied to horses. Most hunt- ing men have known brilliant and stout hunters that were wrong in the wind. Roaring comes after inflammations, ROARING IN HORSES 71 coughs and illnesses, often caused by hot stables. The cooler stables are kept, the freer horses will be from colds, and the distempers that spring out of colds. Mr Hall, who was master of the Holderness Hounds, for many years rode big horses. Near the end of his life, he told me that latterly his horses had kept sounder in wind than formerly, because he kept his stables cooler. Rac- ing stables are often kept too hot, hence roarers and horses being unable to keep their engagements. After all, we must breed powerful animals in spite of extra risks to the wind, inasmuch as little weak ones are useless. Still, with compact conforma- tion, short backs, good ribs, and cool stables, the risk will be small. 72 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR To decide what kinds of horses sire most roarers, Is not a question for veterinary surgeons. Whatever their professional or anatomical knowledge may be, it gives them no advantage In settling the question. It is a matter for observation. Any shrewd old York- shire horse-breeding farmer, who has kept his eyes open all his life, Is a better authority than any number of town professional experts, who have no experience themselves in practical horse-breeding. Such a man will also often be a better judge of what un- soundness and defects are found by experience actually to be hereditary, than the town veterinary surgeons are, with their theories of what they think ought to be hereditary. In a list of ROARING IN HORSES 73 hereditary unsoundnesses lately given forth to the public, by the College of Veterinary Surgeons, one or two are stated to be hereditary that I believe to be not hereditary, and one or two that I know to be hereditary, are left out of their list and not mentioned at all. Nervous affections and tricks such as crib-biting, as well as all peculi- arities of character or mind are apt to be inherited. I once had a mare that was an excellent hunter, except that at her fences she would jump too soon, and if there was a wide ditch on the off side in we used to go. I hunted three of her progeny. Two of them had the same peculiarity. PRESERVING FOXES Fox hunting may be called ' par excel- lence,' the national sport of Great Britain and Ireland. That is to say, sport pure and unadulterated for all people, all ages, and both sexes. Racing is a national sport, but it is adulterated with roguery ; and pheasant shooting is but for the few. But fox hunting is for all, from prince to peasant, duke to chimney sweep, saint to sinner, the millionaire on his ^500 hunter to the costermonger on his ten shilling donkey. The hunt- PRESEKVING FOXES 75 ing field is open gratuitously to every class, and every man in every class ; upper class, middle class, lower class, even criminal class. The sole requisite being ability to beg, borrow, buy, or steal some animal with four legs to sit across. This being so, what are we to say about the man who does what he can to bring to an end this health-pro- ducing recreation for the million, by de- stroying the animal that affords it.'* That he is a selfish scoundrel who is indifferent to the enjoyment of his neighbours, and thinks of nothing but his own gratifications? Is this what we are to say of him ? I think not, though I am sorry to say that when covers are time after time drawn blank, expressions are apt to be strong. Still they are 76 not just. There Is in most cases a truer and more charitable explanation. A poacher will here and there shoot a fox. An Ill-conditioned farmer will here and there poison one. But these are comparatively trifles. If all owners of land Insisted on having foxes, foxes there would be In abundance. Now, I doubt not, most of them do insist, but there Is Insistence and In- sistence. A girl, I have heard (though this of course is only hearsay evi- dence) will sometimes insist on refus- ing a kiss, and yet end by bearing one with Christian fortitude. The game-preserving squire will generally Insist on having foxes, but his game- keeper does not always find himself in any overwhelming disgrace when none PRESERVING FOXES 77 are to be found ; and here Is the secret, — subjection to servants. Many a master Is his servant's servant ; one from Indolence, another from easy- going good-nature, another from help- less Ignorance, another from sheer weak-mindedness, and another from all four. Mr Barham, the author of ' In- goldsby Legends,' said In his old age, about his butler who had lived with him for thirty years, that for the first ten of these years he had been an excellent servant, for the next ten a faithful friend, and for the last ten a very hard master. I wonder how many butlers, head grooms and game-keepers are their masters' very hard masters ! ' Tell William to bring the trap to the door.' In five minutes a message 78 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR came to say, ' The horse Is In grease, sir, and cannot be used ; ' so the stable was visited, and there sure enough stood the animal with legs like four gate posts. ' William,' said his master, ' are you sure the horse has had enough dally exercise ? ' ' Yes, sir, he have. I've taken him out regular,' and back to the house went William's (so- called) master, swallowing the He whole as If It were an oyster, and thinking what a valuable servant William was to find out In time that the horse was unfit to be used. Honest John Jackson Is a game- keeper who carries on, on his own ac- count, with a neighbouring poulterer a tidy little business In the game he Is employed to preserve. One day the PRESERVINCx FOXES 79 squire, his master, asked some friends to come and shoot a few pheasants, but they beat the plantations In vain. One, and only one, was put up ; but the proprietor of the bird crying out In a loud voice ' hen,' nobody fired, and so at the end of the day the game bag was pheasantless. ' Jackson,' asked the Squireen, In a stern voice, ' How do you account for this?' 'Well, sir,' answered the keeper, ' it's them foxes.' ' Dear me,' said the poor victim, ' how very unfortunate ; ' and on he walked, 'nothing doubting.' Jane would be an excellent house- maid if It were not that instead of hands she had only two patent contriv- ances for dropping things on floors. One day her mistress said to her, ' Jane, 8o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR how did this beautiful vase come to be broken ? ' ' Please mum, it was them cats.' And Jane's mistress went her way satisfied, though grieved. One day our Squireen said, ' Jackson, they tell me that a number of steel traps have been found about the place ; is this true ? ' ' Well sir, the farmers do complain of the rabbits awful, so I set a few in the runs ; there Is no other way to keep them down,' ' Bless me,' said his so-called master, ' you don't say so,' and he went away sucking down the lies as if they were so many sticks of sugar candy. I hope now I have succeeded In sug- gesting how It sometimes comes to pass that foxes are not found where foxes ought to be found ; and that it PRESERVING FOXES 8i rarely happens from ill-conditioned in- difference to the pleasures of others, but often from indolence, ignorance, easy-going subjection to servants, and weak-mindedness on the part of pro- prietors of covers. One day at the beginning of the hunting season the great wood at Howsham, belonging to Sir Charles Strickland, was drawn blank by Lord Middleton's hounds, so Sir Charles sent for his game-keeper and said to him, ' Now, you call yourself my keeper, but if foxes cannot be found in my covers, I want to know what is the use of my having a keeper? I, at any-rate see none ; so if at the end of the season I am not satisfied with the number of foxes found on my pro- F 82 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR perty you will have to look for another situation.' It will be observed that Sir Charles Strickland is not a weak- minded person, neither is he his ser- vant's servant. SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT IS CALLED THE CRUELTY OF FIELD SPORTS Amongst the varieties of mankind none are more curious than the sentlment- aHsts who maunder about the cruelty of kllHng animals. I always suspect these people of extreme hardness of heart In real life, like Sterne who deserts his wife and leaves his mother to starve, whilst he sentimentalises for pages to- gether about a dead donkey. 84 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR People talk of the ' hea7^tless humani- tarian.' Of course a man cannot be too really humane, but the typical humani- tarian is only sentimental, a totally dif- ferent thing. Pity is a genuine feeling, sentimentality is only an affection of the imagination, and is for the most part made up of self love in some form, and this implies heartlessness. When the sentimentality is connected with politics it is very apt to be even made up of hatred. The Puritans of many years ago put down bear baiting, ' not,' says Macaulay, ' because they pitied the bears as they professed, but because they hated the rich men of the day whose amuse- ment bear-baiting was ; ' corresponding people of the present day hold forth against the cruelty of fox hunting, but SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 85 they would know better if they could ride and go out hunting. We may say that in a general way a hunting field is made up of ladies, young men, old men, farmers, school- boys, and horse dealers. To accuse all these people of cruelty is ludicrous. Instead of being bloodthirsty, the ladies are flirting, the young men are showing off their riding, the old men are talk- ing politics, the farmers are complaining about their turnips, the horse dealers are puffing off their horses, and the schoolboys are wondering whether they shall tumble off at the next fence or not. So the upshot is, the poor fox gets much neglected. But above all this, hunting means sociality, geniality, good will between rich and poor, and 86 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR equal participation in sport amongst all classes in the district. Hunting is the democracy amongst sports. The ' car Tier e ouverte aiix talents.' The best man on the best horse wins. The young butcher gallops in front of the Duke if he is better mounted or rides better. The poor curate, on his thorough- bred screw, leaves his great patron in the rear, and the tenant farmer clears the fence where his rich landlord comes to grief, and gallops on to the front, leaving his lordship scrambling out of a deep and precipitous ditch. While it lasts a Carnival reigns, but a Carnival that only ends in health of body and health of mind, together with a de- velopment of that hardness, energy and manliness of character which forms so SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 87 necessary a part of the Christian char- acter. ' Endure hardness,' salth the Scripture. For the information of town dwellers I must explain that in some of the hunting countries, the drains are so deep that horse and man sometimes disappear altogether from off the face of the earth and are no more seen. There is a story of this happening once to a distinguished foreigner and his calling loudly for help. But it was, ' Vox et prateixa nihil.'' There was nobody to be seen. ' Where are you ! ' cried out the men within hear- ing. ' I am heeaire — hee — aire in de ditch, God dam.' And there at last he was discovered. I must also explain to my town readers that the best rider is 88 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR sometimes a clergyman, though, per- haps, the cloth does not hunt quite so much as formerly. In the East Riding of Yorkshire it used to be said that if. anyone was in want of advice from his spiritual pastor, his best way to ensure an interview was to go to the meet next hunting day, and look about for him amongst the assembly at the cover side. It is idle for the 'puny dwellers in towns,' as C. Kingsley calls them to inveigh against sports merely because they cannot take part in them. Man is a hunting animal, says one definition of him ; and very puny indeed he would become if all sports and pas- times came to an end. Some of the town folk think that SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 89 gymnastics may take the place of games and sports. They are wrong. The benefit of sports and games is in a great degree spiritual. It consists in the joy, health, exhilaration, and high spirits that attend them. Still, climbing a pole at a gymnasium to get an ap- petite for dinner may be better than nothing. In their attempts at improvement men must not forget that they are men and not mere incarnate senti- mentalities. ' Be not righteous over- much,' we are told ; which does not mean that men can be too righteous, but that it is observed when he thinks too much about himself and his super- fine feelings, he overshoots the mark, and ends in accordance with the 90 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR French proverb, ' Qui veut faire range fait la bete' Like some of the mystics of the middle-ages who held that the only important thing being the feelings and the state of the soul, it was no matter what the body did ; and carry- ing this out in practice they ended by being brutes. ' He,' says Shakespear, ' who tries to do better than well, doth confound himself in his own covetousness.' As to eradicating the enterprising, sporting and hunting instincts from human nature it might possibly be done, but if done what would be left ? Probably a set of hydrocephalous little monsters, who could, perhaps, analyse in a horrible manner, but do nothing else. But analysing, meaning, as Mr SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 91 Ruskin says, destroying in opposition to creating, it is to be feared that a race of men composed of such crea- tures would soon cease to be a race of men at all. Our planet is a glorious planet, but rather a rough one sometimes to live in, so the training for living in it must be rather rough too. It is all very well for bookworms who know no hardship beyond looking out words in dictionaries without being able to find them, to inveigh against those sports and pursuits which are commonly called manly, but these men are excep- tional, and if they were not exceptional, the human race would not last long. Delicate sensibilities are very impor- tant parts of human life, but if there 92 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR were nothing else there would soon be no human life to be delicately sensible, and besides this the exclusive cultivation of delicate sensibilities is observed to de- stroy these very sensibilities themselves. I am afraid it is poor human nature to run down what it cannot excel in, and then to think itself very ' superior.' Chalmers, the great preacher, had none of this weak nonsense in him. In a sermon against cruelty to animals, he distinguished between the death by preymg on one another, which is the universal law of nature, and the cruel purpose to inflict pain ; and he illus- trated his point by describing in glow- ing colours the excitement and interest of an English hunting field, which he termed ' The favourite pastime of joy- SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 93 ous old England, on which there sits a somewhat ancestral dignity and glory.' Then he went on to speak of ' The assemblage of the gallant knighthood and yeomanry of half a province ; ' ' the autumnal clearness of the sky ; ' ' the high-bred coursers ; ' ' the echoing horn ; ' ' the glee and fervency of the chase ; ' and ' the deafening clamour of the hounds ' in such a strain of anima- tion that Lord Elcho's huntsman, who was in the church, declared that he had difficulty in restraining himself from getting up and giving a 'view halloo.' Of course there are a few sincere dreamers and theorists, but as a rule, the man who condemns hunting as cruel is really only telling everybody that he is a bad rider. The man who con- 94 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR demns shooting as cruel Is really only telling everybody that he is a bad shot ; and the man who condemns killing sheep for food really is only telling every- body that he has a weak stomach which cannot digest animal food. After all it is an old story. Poor human nature is poor human nature for ever and ever. ' My countrymen,' says Euprides, ' are foolish in many things, and especially in their admira- tion and cultivation of Athletics. What use is he that can wrestle with skill, or run like a hound, or hurl a quoit to a distance ? ' Really one would think this had been written by one of our own modern and valiant pen warriors, who wage war against things they cannot do themselves. SPOkT AND SENTIMENTALITY 95 The Strong, perfect and healthy soul requires a strong perfect and healthy body ? History shows that If rich men have no manly country sports, they betake themselves to vicious and effeminate lives generally In towns. Then don't have rich men, some will say. But wherever there is liberty there must be rich men. The only way to pre- vent It Is by despotic laws destroying liberty to become rich. In America there Is very much Individual liberty, so America Is full of rich men. A few years ago one of the richest men in the world was said to be Brigham Young. He spent his riches In effem- inate sensuality and unlimited con- cubinage. If he had been an equally 96 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR rich Englishman he would (after being rewarded for his great wealth by a Baronetage) have been an ardent fox hunter, the husband of one wife, chair- man of quarter sessions, Member of Parliament for his county, patron of (and large subscriber to) three local cricket clubs, four local athletic sport clubs, five local coal clubs, six local agricultural societies, seven local horti- cultural societies, eight village schools, and nine county charities ; and when the day of his death came. Sir Brig- ham would have gone down to his grave sincerely mourned and regretted, especially if his successor should have had the misfortune not to be a sports- man, and therefore to live at Paris in- stead of his country place, and conse- SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 97 quently to subscribe neither to the cricket clubs, nor to the athletic sports, nor to the coal clubs, nor to the a^ri- cultural societies, nor to the horticul- tural societies, nor to che village schools, nor to the county charities. Pitt said he would make killing a fox a felony, if doing so would induce country gentlemen to live on their estates. Rich Englishmen love sport. What do rich town dwellers of most other countries love ? ' Take some turns,' says Sydney Dobell ' on the Pincian hills or any Spanish Alamada, or on the Chiaja of Naples, or even the Allees, or Places of those towns in France where Monsieur has no more fatiguing G 98 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ' chasse ' than that of small birds, and I don't think that there can be found anywhere so hopeless a perversion of manliness as you may observe in these young nobles emasculated by generations of effeminacy. Then go to any great 'meet' of wealthy Englishmen and note the wholesome hearty courageous human nature which, whatever their faults, dis- tinguishes the face, make and bearing of four out of five of them.' Sentimentalists talk much of the misery of the animal world, shown by the way animals have of eating one another up ; but animals have little capacity for suffering for they have little mind and no imagination. A lark no doubt is apt to be eaten up by a hawk. But most probably no pain at- SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 99 tends the process. There will be a momentary impulse to escape, answer- ing in a slight degree to what we express by the word fear, but which as Mr Darwin suggests probably is not unpleasant to it, and then at once comes insensibility. And what has there been for the skylark on the other side ? A life of joy inconceivable to poor faulty man as he is in a general way. Teach us, sprite or bird> What sweet thoughts are thine I have never heard Praise of love or wine, That panteth forth a flood of rapture so divine. With thy clear keen joyance Langour cannot be, Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee ; Thus, as we know, sings Shelley. Joy is the aim of creation ; the aim loO HORSES, SPORT AXD WAR successfully carried out till we come to man, who, having free will, takes himself out of nature's hands, makes a fool of him- self in all sorts of ways, and has, of course, to suffer the inevitable retribution for doing so. ' Retribution,' says Hegel, ' is the other side of sin.' They are insep- arable parts of one thing. Joy, I repeat, is the aim of creation. ' Rejoice without ceasing,' saith the Scripture. And again, ' eye hath not seen, nor ear heard neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love him,' which may be called an Oriental way of saying what the more scientific but less poetic European mind might put somewhat as follows : ' Ordi- nary men who care for nothing but sense SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY lOl pleasures like those of the taste, the eye, and the ear, cannot conceive the happiness of which those are capable who obeying the laws of nature, and thus having perfect bodily health, are free, (being also unham- pered by inordinate regard for self), to rejoice with exceeding joy, love, hope, trust, worship and exultation in all the works of God.' The old Hebrews sometimes reached this exultant state of mind as we see by some of the psalms, but the European poets have rarely strength to get above melancholy. ' Our sweetest songs are those that sing of saddest thoughts,' says Shelley. Our belief in the sufferings of animals that are always being hunted and eaten up by each other, comes doubtless partly from stupidity — from that want of imagination I02 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR which leads men to judge of others by themselves. That excellent writer, Mr St George Mivart says that it is ' owing to that inverted anthropomorphism which makes people attribute experiences like their own to brute animals.' But ' even in men ' he says ' suffering depends mostly on the mental state of the sufferer. Savages have comparatively very little sensitive- ness to pain.' The lower we go in the scale of living creatures, the less mind there is so the less suffering. A wasp is eating honey. Somebody cuts it in half by the waist. But the creature neither knows nor cares about the matter but goes on swallowing the food which runs out from the mutilated thorax as fast as it is eaten. Now a stupid man, knowing that if a giant were to cut him in half when he SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 103 was eating his dinner, he would feel seriously incommoded to say the least of it, attributes the same feelings to the wasp. There is much evidence to show that even men do not suffer when they are eaten alive by tigers. Livingstone and several people in India who have been rescued from wild beasts assert that they experienced neither fear nor pain. One of them said that he felt very angry with a tiger that was munching his arm and seeming to enjoy himself but that was all. 'I,' says Ruskin in his old age 'am learning more and more the cruelty of the natiti^e I used to think so divine.' This means that age, illness, and loss of vitality have turned him back from Christianity to paganism and pessimism. Christ, on the contrary, taught that the I04 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR world Is ruled by a lovi7ig father instead of the cruel demons and avenging furies of paganism and savagery, that the aim of nature Is beneficent, and that In men the cheerful Christian passions of hope, faith and delight should reign, Instead of fear, despair, and hatred. Love or charity, as it Is called in the bible, means sympathy with and delight In what Is not self and without regard to self But Ruskin has taken to abusing all things, because he has become too Infirm to enjoy them. And yet the proverb says, ' It Is only bad wine that turns sour In old age.' Still a man should be judged by what he Is at his best not worst, and Ruskin at his best was extremely good. The merit of a racehorse should not be measured by the races he loses SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 105 when old and worn out, but by the Derby he won and the good horses he beat in his prime. Mr Ruskin is Hke Porson, who, when too drunk to be able to light his bed candle d — d ' the nature of things.' But it was not nature that was at fault, but his own condition. So it is with pessi- mists. ' All seems jaundiced to the jaundiced eye.' Cold blooded animals like fish, of course, have sensations as have sensitive plants, but nothing doubtless, like what men call pain. That admirable writer Professor Hux- ley says that misery reigns in the animal world. But he is only judging the lower animals by himself. Mr Huxley knows that if he himself were crossed in love his io6 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR sufferings would be very acute, so he thinks that if an oyster is crossed in love its sufferings will be very acute. Mr Huxley knows that if he saw a monster going to eat him up he would be fright- ened out of his wits, so he thinks that when a frog sees a pike going to eat him up the frog will be frightened out of his wits. Darwin is much wiser when he suggests, as I say, that the frog's sensation is a mere provision to enable it to get out of the way and that it is not painful. Probably in most cases that occur natur- ally where a man would suffer pain or misery one of the lower animals would be insensible or torpid. I say ' that occurs naturally ' for undoubtedly when animals come under the influence of men this will not always hold good. And here we must SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 107 make allowances for Mr Huxley. We can well conceive how a man whose pro- fessional duties render it imperative upon him to watch for days and weeks together cats and dogs writhing under vivisection and who knows that as science advances and every single discovery opens out twenty new fields for investigation each of the twenty opening out twenty more and so ad infinitum, the demand for dogs and cats for physical research must in- crease in all countries in geometrical pro- gression for ever and ever — we can, I say, well conceive how such a man may from these causes get to think suffering to be the rule amongst the lower animals. Some foolish people knowing that they don't want to die think universal death io8 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR proves the world Is a miserable world. But the lower animals don't know they are going to die and even with regard to men, the great surgeon Sir B. Brodle said that when the time comes most men do not suffer and don't wish to live. Schiller said that death must be a good thing Inasmuch as It is universal. Pliny from much clinical observation said that the moment of death Is the most exquisite Instant of life. Dr Solander was so de- lighted with the sensation of dying of extreme cold that he resented his rescue. Dr Hunter In his extreme moments grieved that he could not write how de- lightful it is to die. As I say, no doubt the lower animals who cannot transgress the laws of nature, hardly know the meaning of what we call SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 109 suffering until they come under the man- agement of men. Suffering amongst men comes for the most part from what the Bible calls sin, or as science puts it from transgressing those laws of nature that relate to crea- tures highly developed enough to have free agency and therefore to transgress the laws of nature. Again, the sins of the fathers are, of course, visited on the child- ren unto the third, fourth, fifth and indeed twentieth generation as science teaches us. Sentimentality and real feeling are totally different if not opposite things, whether in relation to the lower animals or to mankind. ' The religion of the heart,' says the author of the ' Natural History of Enthusiasm,' ' may be supplanted by sentimentality, or religion of the im- no HORSES, SPORT AND WAR agination, just as the social affections may be dislodged by factitious sensi- bilities. Every one knows that an artificial excitement of all tender emotions may take place through the medium of the imagination. And every one also knows that these feelings, however nearly they may resemble the genuine workings of the soul, Instead of softening tend to indurate the heart.' The imagina- tion Is not the heart. An excitement of the former Is not an emotion of the latter. Here we see explained how it is that the sentimental Comtist who maunders about r humanitd in general is so often like Comte himself, heartless with regard to human beings in particular ; how It Is that the Socialist who talks plausible moonshine about altruistic self - sacrifice SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY m for the good of this humanity in general, is so often a dead man in relation to the actual well or ill-being of actual men and women in actual real life. The fact is sentimentality, as distinguished from the genuine Christian passions of pity, reverence, etc., is heartless, because it is full of self; and the sentimentalists them- selves are often more or less crazy people, — men with 'bees in their bonnets.' M. Comte's own self-conceit, pride, vanity and arrogance were as his defender J. S. Mill confesses, preternatural and he quarrelled with every one who had to do with him, especially reviling his most intimate friends and benefactors. In fact this ' grotesque pedant ' as Matthew Arnold calls him seems to have been completely heartless, though he passed his life preaching love for the fetish of his imagination he called r humanity. The sentimental, humanitarian Comtlsts are like many philanthropists as distin- guished from Christians ; that Is, they are men with excited Imaginations over Ideas of their own brains, and because they are in their own brains. ' I have never known,' says Coleridge, ' a trader In phil- anthropy who was not wrong at heart somewhere or other.' Often hostile to all individual men, he will lavish money and labour on the abstract notion ' man.' ' Above all,' says Carlyle, ' beware of sentimental friends of the species, .... their own houses (I always find) are little hells of Improvidence, discord and unreason.' Douglas Jerrold hated sentimentality SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 113 and the cant of humanitarlanism. On one occasion when he saw himself described in print as a philanthropist, he exclaimed, ' Zounds ! it tempts a man to kill a child to get rid of the reputation.' ' Philanthropy,' says Mr Stopford Brooke, ' which is not based on natural affection, has often in practice a tendency to cruelty ; ' and again, ' The philanthropist often busies himself w4th schemes, not persons.' His tendency Is to fall In love with schemes (because they are his own) and forget the persons ; thence comes coldness of heart, etc. ; heartless humani- tarlanism, in fact, and sentimentality. Comte had more than once in his life to be consigned to a lunatic asylum. I be- lieve his insanity took the form of con- ceit and thinking himself a saviour of the H 114 world, a common case in lunatic asylums. Half the lunatics in madhouses are lunatics from thinking of themselves and only of themselves. ' It is wonderful,' says Douglas Jerrold, ' how near conceit is to insanity ; and yet how many folks are suffered to go free, and foaming with it.' Sentimentality as distinguished from real feeling is full of conceit and vanity. M. Comte was a Frenchman, so his sentimentality took French forms. According to M. Comte men are to pray but not to God. They are to pray to woman, because she is the sexe aiviant. The prayers are to consist of ' commemo- rations ' and 'effusion.' He gives very precise rules about when and how often men are to open and shut their eyes SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 115 whilst on their knees in prayer. As in his agnosticism and atheism, Comte went back thousands of years to the teaching of Confucius so in his worship of ' r Jmmanitd' he went back to the customs of the ancient savage Indians of San Salvador. They like Comte worshipped abstract ' man' and ' woman.' The former they called Quetzacottle. The latter they called Itziquye. And just like the Comte- ists the men worshipped Itziquye and the women worshipped Quetzacottle. But Comte's behaviour to his own wife was abominable. ' Comte's rhtt77ianitd,' says Mr Fitz- james Stephens, * is an enormous agglom- eration of bubbles which are continually bursting and ceasing to be. No one made or knows anything about it. Love Ii6 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR It dearly, O ye bubbles. There Is no God, and Comte Is his prophet.' This Is another common saying about M. Comte's teaching. The typical sentimentalist of history Is Robespierre, the heartless humanitarian devil of the French Revolution. Robespierre was extremely sentimental. ' Weep, my friend,' he said to a man whose wedding he was attending, ' weep, my friend. If It will relieve your feel- ings.' Another Illustrious sentimentalist was Rousseau. ' Rousseau,' says Macau- lay, ' who was always soaking people's waistcoats with his tears, betrayed and slandered all his benefactors In turn, and sent his children to the Foundling Hos- pital.' In fact, he, like so many senti- mentalists and worshippers of ' man ' In SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 117 the abstract, seems to have been utterly heartless and selfish. ' When the generous affections,' says Carlyle, ' have become paralytic, we have the reign of sentimentality ; ' and again, ' The barrenest of all mortals is the sentimentalist.' Illustration showing the differe7ice be- tween real Christian feeling and sentiment- ality. John Hobson is an agricultural labourer, earning his pound a-week. One day, from a kick of a cart-horse in the back, he was rendered a bedridden cripple for life. Mr Johnson and Mr Jackson are two squires living in the neighbourhood. When the accident happened, the parson of the parish went to Mr Il8 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Johnson, represented the case to him, and asked him whether he would not do something for the destitute family. Mr Johnson was much affected. He shed a great many tears, but explained to the parson that he could not go to see Hobson, because the sensitiveness of his disposition was such that he never could bear to witness distress. Besides which, the calls upon his time and purse were so great, that he could not possibly afford to spend the one or the contents of the other. Then he went into his study and wrote to the Times a gushing, but not strictly true account of the case, which was so beautifully worded that it brought tears into the eyes of many of its readers, and did no good. It is true that a few subscriptions were sent to him, SPORT AND SENTIMENTALIIY 119 but Mr Johnson put them into his own pocket. Mr Jackson, too, heard of the accident. He did not wait for the parson, and he had no time to shed tears ; but he ordered his cob and trotted off five miles to Hobson's cottage. Before the year was over, through Mr Jackson's activity and good management, Hobson had been taught to make cane- bottomed chairs, his wife took In washing, two girls stayed at home to help their parents, one or two children were sent to school, the rest were provided with situations, and the family was on Its legs again. The two squires each had a nephew. The boys w^ere at the same school. Each went to pass the Christmas holidays with I20 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR his uncle. Mr Jackson's nephew thought he was in heaven all the holidays. His uncle gave him a pony to ride with the hounds, and, for the non-hunting days, a gun with which he had before the time came to return to school missed nearly every pheasant on the estate. The boys travelled to school together. ' Well,' said Mr Jackson's nephew, with his mouth full of liquorice and his pockets full of pears — results of a part investment of his uncle's tip — ' Well, and what have you been doing ? Did you hunt ? ' ' No,' said Mr Johnson's nephew, ' my uncle calls hunting cruel.' 'Did you shoot .'^ ' ' No, he calls shooting cruel, too.' ' Did you fish ? ' ' No, he calls fishing cruel, too.' 'Then what on earth did you do .^ ' ' Well, Uncle Johnson sometimes played SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 121 at chess with me. But one day I beat him and he did not play again.' ' Did he tip you when you left ? ' ' Well, no, not exactly, but he gave me this book.' ' Oh, how jolly, what is it, ''Arabian Nights" or " Robinson Crusoe," or " Nimrod's Northern Tour," or — or — ' here the boy's eye fell on the title-page, which he read out with the intonation peculiar to school- boys, as follows : ' Essays reprinted from the Monthly Sceptic^ by John Johnson, Esq.' Then turning over a leaf, he went on to read the table of contents. PAGE Introduction . . . .1 On the Sensibilities of the poetical tem- perament . . . -13 On Altruism . . . -25 Religio Humanitatis . . -37 On the incompatibility between field-sports and an advanced state of civilisation . 50 M. Comte and his teaching . -55 122 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Mr Jackson's nephew shut the book, made an expressive grimace, and returned the volume to the other boy. ' And here,' he said, cutting off and handing to him a great piece of Hquorlce, ' you'll want something to take after It.' Now there Is no reason why a man like Mr Johnson, sentimentality and all, may not be a complete and perfectly heartless scoundrel ; as complete a one as Edward Steel, who was, on the 22nd September, 1886, had up and sentenced by Mr D'Eyncourt to six months' hard labour -for habitually thrashing and some- times nearly killing his son, eleven years of age. It came out In the evidence that Steel was a local preacher, who preached and prayed In Hyde Park, often shedding SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 123 tears copiously whilst pouring forth his exhortations. ' Sentimentality, and the profession of love for mankind, are,' says G. H. Lewis, ' consistent with being a bad husband, a bad father, a bad brother, a bad friend, and a bad man.' ' What Is called sentimental writing,' says Horace Walpole, ' though It be under- stood to appeal solely to the heart, may be the product of a bad one. One would imagine that Sterne had been a man of a very tender heart ; yet I know, from indubitable authority, that his mother, who kept a school, having run In debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would have rotted In jail If the parents of the scholars had not raised a subscrip- tion for her. Her son had too much 124 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR sentiment to have any feeling. A dead ass was mote important to him than a Hving mother.' ' The man,' said Sterne to Garrick, * who can ill-treat his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head.' ' I hope,' answered Garrick, ^ your house is insured.' 'I told Irving,' says Carlyle, 'that love concentred on a few objects or a single one, was like a river flowing within its appointed banks, calm, clear, rejoicing in its course. Diffused over many, it was like that river spread over a province — stagnant, cold and profitless. He puckered up his face at this remark, and talked about the Devil and universal benevolence.' ' Love for the whole world,' says Mr SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 125 Seely, ' Is not Christianity, but Jacobinism. It Is not love at all. It Is merely an Idea, heated In the Imagination, and often much more nearly connected with hate. The real all-purifying passion must, It Is plain, be a passion for individuals.' The 'enthusiasm of humanity' Is, in fact often nothing but sentimental cant. ' Free your mind from cant,' said Dr Johnson. Fancy the glorious old doctor accosted by one of our ' humanity-In-the- aggregate ' lovers. ' Sir,' he would have said, ' what you say Is cant, and Insincere cant. Sir, if you learned to-morrow that Asia was submerged and six hundred millions of people drowned, you would say, "How shocking," according to custom in such cases. Then you would go to breakfast, and get very angry if your egg 126 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR was too hard-boiled. Sir, free your mind from cant.' Dr Johnson's own mind was quite free from cant, but he manifested all his life, in thought, word, and deed, actual pity for actual suffering individual men and women, such as I myself have never heard of in the case of M. Comte or any of his sentimental disciples. Possibly there may be Comtists like Dr Johnson in this respect, but if so, it will be in spite of, not in con- sequence of, their Comtism. There seldom has lived a man so chari- table and so tender hearted as Samuel Johnson. But he was absolutely without sentimentality and pretence of feeling. ' Sir,' he said, ' if a friend of mine were being tried for his life I would do all in my power for him, but once fairly hanged I should not suffer.' Dr Johnson was the SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 127 opposite to men like Robespierre and Rousseau who whilst they doubtless would not have moved a finger to save a friend would have buckets of tears to shed at his death. Robespierre the heartless senti- mentalist is, I repeat, the model devil of history. Of course he has his white- washers, but it must be so. ' Every fool,' says Rochefoucald, ' can find some greater fool still to admire him.' So also we may say that every rogue finds some greater rogue still to admire him, or every scoundrel can find some greater one still to admire him. Birds of a feather stick up for each other. Mankind's verdict on Robespierre has been pronounced. The question is settled for ever. The worship of the fetish * humanity ' really means in many cases either hatred 128 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR of religion and of Christianity or poli- tical partisanship and antagonism. Mr Clifford, the mathematician and humanity- worshipper, was, says Mr P. Greg, an impassioned Atheist. He hated God as a Tory hates Democracy, or as a modern Radical hates liberty. Again, he says, ' Agnostic hope, Positivist zeal, are really for victory in the present controversy ; ' and again, * half the philanthropy of the day is almost undisguised envy, hatred and malice.' One form the sentimentality of humanity- worship takes is patriotism-reviling cos- mopolitanism. A certain scientist of the day, standing up for anti-patriotic cos- mopolitanism, says, ' Patriotism is nation- ally what selfishness is individually.' Ruskin called this ' the eternally d — d SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 129 modern view about the matter.' In fact a man may heat his imagination about some such idea as love for the world in general and at the same time be, as I have said, a completely heartless scoundrel like the enthusiastic and eloquent cosmo- politan Comtist and Socialist who went to a philanthropic meeting of his sect, pro- posed a resolution which was carried unanimously, that ' patriotism being mere selfishness and inconsistent with progress of the species must give place to altruistic enthusiasm for universal humanity,' and the next day was had up before the magistrates for nearly killing his wife by hammering her on the head with a clock- weight. The more wives a man has, the less real affection he is capable of. So it is I 133 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR with patriotism. A man can be passion- ately devoted to one country, but if he begins to talk of cosmopolitanism and humanity-in-general, we may be pretty sure that it is only because he has be- come so far a dead man ; dead to all * natural affections in the matter/ except selfish ones. ' If anyone were to tell me,' says one of the characters in ' Kenelm Chillingley,' * that he would care half so much if ten million human beings had been swallowed up by an earthquake in Africa as he would for a rise in his butcher's bills, I would not believe him.' On the other hand, many would bear tortures to save some one person from suffering, and many would die for their country. But these would not be senti- SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 131 mental Comtists and humanlty-in-general worshippers. ' I can love a man,' says Hare, ' but the mere abstract, bodiless, heartless, soulless notion '' man," affords no home for my affections.' * To love,' says Burke, 'the little platoon we belong to In society Is the germ of all public affection.' M. Comte's affection for riizunanitd seems, according to J. S. Mill, to have been based on hatred of the little platoon he be- longed to. ' Benevolence (so called) to the whole species and want of feeling for every Individual with whom the professors of this benevolence come In contact form,' says Lowell, ' the character of the senti- mentalist.' 132 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR The genuine sentimentalist being full of himself is usually like Rousseau, miser- able. He can enjoy nothing. He is so earnest in his egotisms that he cannot laugh. He has no sense of humour. 'Surely,' says J. S. Mill, ' Comte never laughed in his life.' But the man without a sense of humour is never wise and is often mad. ' Humour,' said Emerson, * is a pledge of sanity, a protection from gloomy insanities. A perception of the comic seems to be an essential element in a fine character. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible.' The lowest savages never laugh. Negroes laugh, but they are not the lowest savages. The lowest scoundrels never laugh. The grim (earnest as he calls it) politician who reviles ' sport ' SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 133 seldom laughs, and has as a rule no sense of humour. One of the revilers of all sports Is the grim utilitarian and materialist who would banish everything from human life that he calls ' illusion.' ' A crown,' said a writer in the journal TrittJi, ' is nothing but a metal pot.' ' Cricket,' says another of the kind, ' is only hitting a ball to a distance to bring it back again.' Fox hunting is only running after a stinking animal with a long tail. A doll is but wax and sawdust. Divine music is only vibrations from rubbing horse hair on catgut. A cross is only a bit of wood nailed at right angles to another bit of wood ; poetry besides proving nothing Is not good to eat, and so on, and so on. Such creatures should be hanged. Why not } They pass their 134 EIORSES, SPORT AND WAR lives killing the joy, the life, the love, the beauty and the goodness that is in the souls of men. Surely killing living souls is as bad as killing their bodies. And men are hanged for that. ' Trust in thy heart,' says Longfellow, ' and in what the world calls illusion.' Of course, for these so-called illusions are in truth the realities which distinguish men from the lower animals and brute-like savages. But the genuine materialist cannot see this, inas- much as he is (whatever his mere wits) spiritually on the same level as the lowest animals. He passes his life grovelling on the ground so he can only see the things that are on the ground. He is a faithless, heartless, hopeless, joyless wretch who renounces Christianity because Chris- tianity means faith, hope, pity, admiration SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 135 and reverence with joy in all that Is good and beautiful, all which things he calls * illusions.' The above assertions of Materialists about crowns, dolls, hunting, religion, morality, etc., are simply lies of the most enormous magnitude, for instead of these things being nothing they are everything ; they are human life and human happiness. The doll means child fancies and child joys or life without limit. Fox hunting means health, happiness, energy, manli- ness, enterprise, geniality and sociability between all classes. A crown is a symbol of one's country that has, since men have lived on the earth inspired the noblest passions of loyalty and patriotism. And we are told by the cynical materialist that it means nothing more than a 136 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR tin sauce-pan ! A cross Is the symbol to express self-sacrifice, duty, devoted- ness, godliness of character and all the highest qualities that distinguish men from apes, pigs and materialists. Of course, as I have said, the ape, the pig, and the materialist cannot see this and we do not expect them to see it. ' Virtue and goodness to the vile seem vile.' By ' materialists ' I do not so much mean men with any special opinions as men whose spiritual deficiencies, natural or ac- quired, cause that shallowness, meanness, and meagreness and deadness of character which Is known by the term ' materialism,' and which takes innumerable forms, such as irrellgiousness, cynicism, carping discon- tent, recreation-hating, grimness, utilitari- anism, ' the spirit which denies,' mere SPORT AND SENTIMENTALITY 137 analysings and critlcisings, selfishness, egotism, sensuality, etc. ' Beware,' said Sidney Smith to Jeffries, ' of Indulging too much In the merely criti- cal faculties. A doll Is nothing but wax and sawdust; a pound is nothing but a d — d yellow circle ; a picture Is nothing but oil and pigments. This sort of thing ends in the rankest utilitarianism which means logically carried out, that a man should make portable soup of his grandmother/ SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS OF CHARACTER This paper Is designed to show the Im- portance of sports from a national point of view. Sport tends to keep up manliness In a nation as distinguished from the effeminacy and cowardice exclusive Industrialism tends to produce. The forces of Indolence, love of low pleasures, care only for the present moment, etc., are TItantIc forces always pulling civilised nations back towards SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 139 barbarism, and, according to history, always successfully In the long run. Every nation has gone down when Its time came. One of nature's contrivances for keep- ing nations up to the mark Is, according to history and science, war on occasion. Industrial competition Is another of an opposite kind. If either of these reigns in a country to the exclusion of the other, national character and thence national prosperity seem to deteriorate. Then gradually comes unfitness to survive In the struggle of life between nations. Industrialism brings the riches necessary for safety against foreign foes. But me^^e industrlal-mlndedness and care only for the physical comforts of life generation after generation, must tell to the bad on I40 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR the national character. One or two illus- trations : First an illustration of the opposite type or the manliness produced by years of what the mere industrialist despises as militaryism ; that is to say the kind oi mind and character produced by heredi- tary habits of patriotism, of manly activity and of obedience to duty. A few years ago the ' Northfleet ' was run down by the ' Murillo ' and began to sink. The boats were let down and Captain Knowles ordered that the women and children should be got into them. Knowles with a revolver in his hand said he would shoot the first man that got in the way to prevent this. One man pushed forward to get into the boats and Captain Knowles did shoot him. The women and SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 141 children were disembarked and two boats full got away. Then the ship sank, the Captain himself going down with her after having sent off as many as possible. Another illustration of courage and manliness that comes of generations of militaryism in the blood. In 1880 Her Majesty's ship 'The Invincible' was steaminof out from Alexandria when a man fell overboard. The Honourable E. W. Freemantle, Captain of the ship, at once sprang overboard just as he was. When he reached the spot where the man had gone down he found him already some distance under water. He dived, brought him up, and with great difficulty kept his head above water till a boat reached them. Illustrations of a like kind without end might be given. 142 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR At the shipwreck of the ' Birkenhead ' the soldiers, when they learned they could only save themselves by the sacrifice of the women and children, mustered silently on deck obeying the word of command as simply as they would have done on the parade ground, and so went down when the ship went down. Such is the spirit sometimes developed where generation after generation of mere money making industrialism has not destroyed everything that is noble, actively unselfish, heroic and self-sacrificing — in one word ' Christian.' Now we will see what generations oi mere petty money-making middle-class effeminate industrialism in the blood does to men. One Sunday in 1881 a little girl fell into some shallow water in a London Park and was drowned. Above fifty respectably SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 143 dressed people of the middle-class were on the spot looking on, any one of whom could easily have saved the child ; but not one attempted to do so. To get wet and risk a cold was inconceivable to them. To be sure they sent in a dog, but nothing was saved but the child's bonnet which the dog retrieved. There is hardly a working man in the country that would not have had the child out of the water in two minutes. ' The virtues,' says Green the historian ' that spring from war, are personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, and a high and stern sense of manhood. If this is true, and true of course it is, it implies that from the opposite to war, that is, from generations of 7iiere industrial habits of mind there springs the opposites 144 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR to these things. And this also Is undoubtedly the case. Lives of pure, unmixed Quakerish Industrialism lead (exceptions apart) to timidity, to helpless dependence one upon another, to effemi- nacy, to disregard for truthfulness, to adulteration of goods, etc. ' Without war,' says Oulda the novel writer, ' all the higher virtues would die out.' Speaking about Lord George Gordon's rioters Samuel Johnson said, ' I went to see the Protestants plundering the Sessions House, setting fire to the Fleet Prison, and burning and pulling down houses, etc. There were not, I believe, a hundred ; but they did their work at leisure with no one to Interrupt them. Sttch is the cowardice in a commercial state of society.' SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 145 Energy, physical vigour and capacity for active unselfishness or heroism are In the long run necessary for men who are raised above barbarism, If they wish to remain raised, and history tells us that these things do not thrive In a country where there Is nothing age after age but industrialism and commerce. No doubt there Is plenty of commerclal-mlndedness in America, but If there had been nothing else, the North would never have beaten the South In the civil war. Separation would have taken place and slavery would now be reigning more Impregnably than ever. Long inherited habits of exclusive in- dustrialism develop particular qualities, admirable In their way, that become more marked, according to the law of heredity, K 146 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR in every generation, such for instance as foresight, industry and thrift. But ex- chtsive industriahsm is fatal in the long run. A tribe of ants sometimes thinks it can get along very well with nothing but its wealth producers. So it disbands its army and does away with every other class. The result always is that some other tribe of ants who have kept up their heroic qualities in a short time wages war upon what we may call the tribe of Quaker Ants and makes slaves of them. Christianity means being ' Christ's faith- ful soldier, to fight manfully^ against sin, the world, and the devil. Quakerish in- dustrialism means being an old woman who runs away at a moment's notice and concedes to sin, the world, and the devil. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 147 whatever sin the world and the devil may happen to ask for. Quakerism as a religion means the narrow, shallow, one-sided view viere industrialism takes of Christianity. Christ talks of ' the peace of God,' a spiritual condition that comes from holiness of mind or all purely selfish anxieties, pride, vani- ties, covetousness and troubles, being de- stroyed by delight and joy in what is not self, hence ' peace.' The Quaker takes this word and thinks it means running away w^hen there Is danger and * sub- mitting themselves ' to every ordinance imposed upon them by conquerors ' for the Lord's sake,' or rather for the pocket's sake, inasmuch as war interferes sadly with the buying and selling. The ideal state of pure, unmixed in- T48 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR dustrialism which Is looked forward to by the merely commercial mind as the state of the blessed, would be a more degraded condition of society even than one of active savagery. In the latter at any rate some manliness would occasionally be manifested amidst the brutality. But in- dustrialism alone could, as men are made, end at last in nothing but an eternally monotonous dead level of meanness, cupidity, petty vices, effeminacy and cowardice. At least history and experi- ence tell us so, and we have nothing else to go by. We hear stories about the natives of Cyprus which Illustrate the way devotion to money-making and devotion to war produce different types of character. The Cypriotes are composed of Turks and SPORT, AVAR AND MANLINESS 149 Greeks. For centuries the Turks have been the rulers and fighters but not money makers, whilst the Greeks have been money makers but not fighters. In 1883 a rush of water from the mountains de- stroyed a village. The Turks worked hard to save their wives and children. The Greeks cried like children from terror, but were too frightened to go near the water. I'he Turk Is truthful, sensual, indolent and courageous ; he Is the ruin of every country he undertakes to govern. The Greek of Cyprus Is sharp, cunning, active, cowardly, sensual and an Infinite liar. Those English people who have much industrialism in the blood sym- pathise with the Greeks ; some people of the opposite kind with the Turks. But whether Turk or Greek they little deserve 150 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR sympathy as they are at present. Suppos- inor the case of a statesman of the In- dustrlal type loving the Greeks and hating the Turks he would think this to arise from the virtuousness of his own char- acter and the profundity of his own wisdom ; but It would, as a rule really arise from hereditary Industrialism in his blood. There are everywhere, except amongst quite the lowest savages, the two separate classes — industrialists and non-Indus- trlalists ; both, I repeat necessary. In Egypt we see the thing. There are warriors of the desert devoted to their country, their chiefs and their religion, who fight magnificently. In the towns and villages there are trading people who don't fight and who care for nothing but SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 151 getting what money they can out of foreign invaders. Speaking of Lombardy and Tuscany, when these countries had become exclu- sively mercantile, Macaulay says ' the sedentary habits of the desk and the loom rendered the exertions and hardships of war insupportable.' Thus, of course, when war came, these Italians proved helpless, incapable and cowardly and necessarily were conquered. If the mere industrialists get their way, England will be in the same plight. What has hitherto saved her has been the existence of classes not tied to the loom, the desk and the counter. But the socialists work with all their strength to sweep away these classes of men. Thus we see how nations fall. 152 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Russia provides us with an instance of the disastrous consequences of the want of manhness produced by gener- ations following mere industrial pursuits. The Jews in that country, superior as they are in almost every respect except fighting capacity to the Tartar sort of people amongst whom they live, are slaughtered, tortured and insulted in every possible manner without apparently any attempt at resistance. Conceive Anglo-Teutonic people — Americans we will say of the backwood type — in the place of these Jews. In the first place the Russians would never dare to attack them, but if they did, for every wife or daughter insulted a six-shooter would assuredly bring about a speedy reckoning. But the poor Jews seem like so many sheep. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 153 Of course there are Anglo-Teutons, and Anglo - Teutons and we certainly find some of the race full of centuries of industrialism In the blood who say that force is never a remedy and that any- thing in the world is better than blood- guiltiness, and who therefore would no doubt, if they were In the place of these poor Jews, meekly turn the other cheek and humbly offer the other daughter. Some of our conceding - to - criminality statesmen profess to be religious men, so their maxim in such a case would doubtless be ' him that taketh thy wife forbid not to take thy daughter also.' The opinions of Industrial classes in a commercial country come in a vast degree from their inherited industrial Instincts. Mr Herbert Spencer holds that the 154 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR opinions of the mass of mankind come partly from what they believe to be their interests and partly from inherited in- stincts, the intellect being used chiefly to prove and defend the opinions already held. To give instances. That excellent man Sir Wilfred Lawson, seems to be some- thing very like a peace-at-any-price man. But Lawson is a corruption of ' Levi-son,' or ' son of Levi.' Now the Jews for hundreds upon hundreds of years have been non - fighting buyers and sellers. Probably there is not a large precentage of Jewish blood in Sir Wilfred. Still there may be enough to tell on the inherited instincts. Again, take another almost peace-at-any-price man, the late Mr John Bright. Here we find Jewish non- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 155 fighting blood mixed with generations of British industrial and non-fighting blood. Says Bailey in ' Festus,' ' War must be, while men are what they are, While rights are worth maintaining, freedom keeping, Or life having, so long the sword shall reign.' This means that the sword can never permanently be sheathed on this earth. ' So long,' says Baron de Goltz, ' as nations of the earth strive after earthly goods and aim at securing for future generations room for development and peace and respect, so long as they, led by great spirits, strive beyond the narrow compass of every-day needs and mere material requirements, towards the real- isation of civilised ideals, so long there will be war. The nation that is resolved 156 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR to fight no more would Inevitably in a very short time be unpleasantly reminded of the fact that in states as well as in indi- viduals ' there is a great deal of human nature.' Industrialists who talk about the horrors of war seem quite unconscious of the horrors of peace. A man is killed in battle. Yes, but everybody dies sooner or later, and if he had not died in battle he would perhaps have lived a life of vice and died of a long, lingering, miserable death by some torturing disease lasting for many years. The Industrialists tell the soldiers that they are miserable because they have to fight. But soldiers as a rule wish to fight. Then they are not miserable because they have to fight. In fact, perhaps the SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 157 soldier knows what makes him happy a Httle better than the shop-keeper whose ideas and imaginations reach about as far as the other side of his counter. Lord Wolseley says, there is no bHss to be compared to fighting. Ruskin says that 'all healthy men like fighting and like the sense of danger.' The horrors of war are from their nature more vividly and easily realised to the average imagination than the horrors of eternal peace. But this comes from the weakness of the average imag- ination. Talking about the horrors of war the Bishop of Peterborough said, ' Some day we may wish that they had come even in the shape of defeat, if we might so have been saved from the still greater horrors bred of our own sins in 158 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR times of profound ease and peace — horrors of Ignoble love of pleasure, degrading worship of wealth, demoralising dis- honesties that come from the inordinate lust to possess It, exaggerated love of luxury, vice, and the cynicism that sneers away all those better thoughts and higher aims that are the breath of a nation's nobler life.' Verily the horrors of a national life exclusively industrial are sometimes far greater than the horrors of war. At the same time not a word ought to be said against money making or luxuries in their place. Money making is a neces- sity to a civilised country, and real luxury (beautiful things and lives surrounded by beauty) Is admirable in Itself beside the production of beautiful things giving SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 159 enormous employment to the working classes. ' Men,' said both Sidney Smith and Dr Johnson, ' can hardly be better employed than In making money.' Riches are of course necessary to render a country safe from conquest. M. Taine makes some good remarks on the effect of generations of effeminate habits. At the end of the eighteenth century there was, he says, ' In the upper and the middle class, a hrorror of blood- shed ; the softness of manners and the idyllic tone of sentiment, had unnerved the combative Instinct. Magistrates everywhere forgot that the protection of society and of civilisation Is Infinitely more important than the preservation of the lives of a set of malefactors and mad- men ; that the fundamental object of i6o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR government, as of police, is to maintain order by means of force ; that a policeman is not a philanthropist ; that if he is attacked at his post he ought to use his sabre, and that he fails in his duty when he sheathes it for fear of hurting the aggressor.' Conquest by war, and thence Civilisa- tion. This seems one of Nature's ways. The Coreans, we are told by Mr Carles, are a people who have a little civilisation which came from war — from being con- quered by the Chinese 3000 years ago. But they have been without war ever since. They are described as peaceful and civil to strangers, decent and orderly in their dress and demeanour — that is when they are sober, but it is common to see the men rolling about the roads SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS i6i helplessly drunk and nobody takes any notice of them. Condemnation of drunk- enness Is undreamed of. They have no wants, so trade with them Is Impossible. The Corean gets through the very little work he does, Vv^Ith one hand, the other being wanted to hold his pipe, which Is three feet long. Nothing will Induce him to drop his pipe for a moment. It almost looks as If the Coreans want con- quering again. ' What rigid! asked Lord Hartlngton once, 'had we In Affghanlstan ?' Well, the same right that his ancestors had In England. If they and such as they had not come to England and waged war on the natives, England would now have been Inhabited by British Celts with their Druldic rites and customs. We L 1 62 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR should now be filling gigantic basket- work erections with men, women, and children, and burning them alive. Every superior race has a right to displace nations composed of brutes, or savages, or devils. If Lord Hartington had said Instead of what 7'ight had we in Affghan- Istan ' what advantage to England was the invasion of Affghanistan,' there would have been some sense In it, for undoubt- edly a limit must be put even to bene- ficent conquest. Every country's bene- ficent doings must be regulated by its means for doing them. War Is unchristian says the poor Quakerish person. But perhaps the Bishop of Manchester is as good a judge of what Christianity means as the poor Quakerish person. And what does he say.'^ SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 163 In April 1887 at Blackpool, the Bishop said he felt that the future of our empire, though of great promise, was not with- out its peril. ' We see,' he said, ' two Powers rising in the world — one in the West and the other in the East — with vast populations increasing with immense rapidity, and evidently destined to play a great part in history. One of these Is the United States, and the other is the great Empire of Russia. It would obviously be impossible for such an empire as ours to hold Its own unless It continues to be great ; second rate Powers, It is clear, would be In great danger of losing their liberty. How is England to maintain her position in the world? We stand face to face In dif- ferent parts of our dominions with 164 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Germany, Russia and the United States. Our empire comprises three main portions besides the mother-country, — Australia, Canada and India. Russia has been steal- ing with cat-like tread across the steppes of Central Asia till she has come within a short march of Herat ; and as to Canada, we have the United States stretching right across Its southern boundary. How are we to meet these perils ? There can be no safety for England but in making every Englishnan a match and more than a match mentally, morally and bodily for' each foreigner. We want to Inculcate a certain element of cha7'acter In our people to make them self-sacrificing, determined, full of moral courage, never knowing when they are beaten,' etc. etc. No Quakerism here ! SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 165 War unchristian ! But Christianity did not come ' to send peace, but a sword.' Christianity does not alter the things men do, but only the spirit in which they do them. Human life must go on, Christianity or no Christianity. Eating, drinking, buying, selling, marry- ing and fighting are still necessities, only Christianity sanctifies them, that is, puts into them the spirit Christ put into them. It puts temperance into eating and drinking, honesty into buying and selling, love and affection into marrying, and humanity into fighting. It makes men pity what is below them, reverence and worship what is above them, believe in ' things working together for good,' hope in the future, rejoice in the present, * endure hardness,' ' quit themselves like i66 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR men' ' do with the whole might what the hand finds to do,' and strive with passionate hunger and thirst after right- eousness, as well as after the punish- ment of wickedness and vice, savagery, disorder and wrong. To think that Christianity only means negative Quak- erism and the feminine sentiments is to be either a mediaeval anchorite or a modern quietist — it is to take one facet of Christianity for all. The peace-at-any-price sect doubtless believe that their principles come from Christianity, but they really come for the most part from commercial-mindedness, insular isolation, narrow surroundings, Quaker quietism, much appreciation of material good things, little appreciation of great and heroic or Christian ones, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 167 and last but not least a certain distaste to being shot. ' To war,' says Goldwin Smith, ' we largely owe our respect for discipline, our Ideas of self-devotion, of chivalry, of honour, and even our emancipation from the abject fear of death. Nobody is nobler than the good soldier or sailor, nobody more humane. War Is now a great school of humanity. Of the two sets of passions it seems to me that those which are excited In America by the presidential contest are worse than those which are excited by war.' There is more hatred and diabolical passion entertained by trade - unionists against non-unionists (or as they are well called In Australia ' free men ') In one extensive strike than is entertained In 1 68 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR modern civilised warfare by hostile armies in fifty years. The trade-unionists would murder the ' free men ' wholesale if they dared, but nobody hates a man he is shooting at at long range two miles off. Rulers of men may be divided into two classes ; the Christian militant ruler and the limp-and-flabby or non - ruling ruler. The first of these classes wages a never-ending war with all vice, folly, dirt, unrighteousness, lawlessness, dishonesty, idleness and crime, insisting on the con- trary to these things at the point of the bayonet if there is no other way. The peace-at-any-price or non-ruling ruler of men is very different. Often well mean- ing, though ignorant and narrow minded, he is generally engaged in trade, or at any rate belongs hereditarily to the trading SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 169 class. Though he knows the lower races of men to be Ill-behaved, he says, ' Do leave the poor, dear, lazy, lying, dirty, cruel, torturing, murdering people alone, and then they will very likely not cut your throat ; but If you Interfer with them nobody can tell what they won't do.' ' A land flowing with milk and honey,' that might be dotted over with the happy homes of thousands or millions of in- dustrious, orderly, and civilised people, stretches out as far as the eye can reach. This country Is inhabited by a dark- skinned person who Is dressed In greases and cow-dung, with a skewer through his nose for ornament, and who lives for the most part by thieving, murder and plunder. It Is proposed to annex or make use of this country. ' No,' says the limp- I70 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR and-flabby or non-ruling ruler of men, ' to do this thing would be unjust to the owners of the country. It might also lead to bloodshed, and bloodshed is unchristian. Besides this, to annex the country would certainly end in expenditure of money. Now, money is a thing to make, not to spend unproductively, making it being, in fact, " the whole duty of man." As to the living by thieving and plunder, it should never be forgotten that every race of men should be allowed to manage itself according to its own ideas.' War is so opposed to the daily habits of purely industrial people that industrial and commercial politicians are never tired of asserting that wars are only caused by kings and aristocracies. But this is merely ignorance of history and of human SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 171 nature. Wars seem to increase with democracy and popular education. ' The progress of enhghtenment,' says Pro- fessor Seely ' has had no perceptible effect in diminishing war. The progress of popular government has had the effect of producing war. The people,' he goes on to say, ' in a popular war do not mind how many lives are squandered.' Mr Herbert says ' that the more demo- cratic states become, the more ruthlessly wars are waged.' Formerly it was a rule of international law and custom for de- fenceless towns to be spared ; but Ad- miral Aube, Ministre de la Marine in ultra democratic France, teaches that in case of war with Great Britain the open and de- fenceless coast towns are to be attacked. ' Attack without warning, under cover of 172 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR night, and burn, blow up and batter down,' are the laconic instructions to French naval officers ; and especially to burn, blow up and batter down those towns which are provided with no means of retaliation. ' When democracy,' says Lord Wol- seley according to his interviewer, ' is thoroughly established in England, the chief security against war will have disappeared. It is democracies that make wars.' Possibly in the matter of the amount of war there may not be so much difference as in the viode of carrying on war. The mode will it seems be less humane the more democratic nations become. A false and unscientific view very commonly taken by people of the SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 173 Quaker kind Is looking on this world as a place for man to live in eternal and perpetual ease, comfort and peaceful Interchange of commodities. Science, or true knowledge, tells a very different story. ' After all,' says Tom Hughes, ' what would life be without fighting ? From cradle to grave, fighting, rightly under- stood Is the highest, honestest business of every man. Every one who Is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten be they evil thoughts and habits in him- self, or spiritual wickedness In high places, or Russians or Border-ruffians, or Bill, or Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in peace till he has thrashed him.' Eccentric theories opposed to facts of 174 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR history, or of human nature are sure to be wrong. ' It affords,' says Professor Blackle, ' a presumption against the Quakers that men of all nations and in all countries, have fought great battles with their neighbours, and become great and strong by fighting great battles.' The Quaker-type man is too shallow to see the good that is in apparent ill ; such for instance as war which disturbs their routine of physical comfort and petty interests. Wise men like American Emerson can see this good. 'The frost,' he says, ' which kills the harvest of the year saves the harvest of the century by destroying the weevil and the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immoveable routine, clear the ground of rotten races, and open a fair field to new men.' SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 175 Foolish people, that is very foolish people, think Christianity means nothing but sentimental humanitarianism and con- demnation of war. But Christ said, ' I came not to send peace, but a sword,' ' This,' says Professor Seely, ' will appear when considered, to be the most tre- mendous speech ever uttered.' In fact it means that the war between good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness, civilisation and savagery, cleanliness and filth, order and disorder, construction and destruction, must on this earth be an eternal one sometimes the one kicking the beam, sometimes the other. ' Civilised human life,' say wise men, ' means eternal war to the death, against crime, disorder and filthy savagery.' ' Civilised human life,' says Quaker in- 176 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR dustrlalism, ' means eternal peace and piggish comfort, acquired by eternal buy- ing, selling and haggling and adulter- ating goods.- Of men like St Paul or Charles Gordon, whose lives are one long battle for good against evil, for civilisa- tion against savagery, many a politician in a merely industrial state of society can only say ' Paul, thou art beside thy- self;' or 'Gordon, thou art mad.' Purely Christian action, that is, action without selfish motive of some kind often seems to be incomprehensible to them. These people often complain that the great national rewards and honours are given to soldiers and sailors, instead of to philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and other such people. Now the ideas the philosophers supply us with are sometimes SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 177 very useful, but the soldiers and sailors secure to us the life we live and the property we possess. The ideas of philosophers are very nice things, but life is nicer. Indeed, the very ideas themselves depend on secu- rity to life and property. Without this security there would be no leisured class, and without a leisured class there would be no philosophers and men of science to get ideas. ' Were Socrates,' said Dr Johnson ' and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say ' follow me and hear a lecture on philosophy,' and Charles, laying his hand on his sword to say, ' follow me to dethrone the Czar,' a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. The pro- fession of soldier or sailor has the dignity M 178 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR of danger. Mankind reverence those who have got over fear, which is so common a weakness.' So said Dr Johnson ; but then he did not Hve in days of senti- mental sham - humanitarianism, when patriotism and family affection are called only ' forms of selfishness ' and are sacri- ficed to that form of sentimental heartless- ness called ' humanity-in-general worship;' when courage is looked on as old- fashioned nonsense ; when no force is ever to be used against the devil and all his works ; when unlimited concessions are made to the demands of criminal and barbarous people ; and when legislative dishonesty, confiscation, theft and crime, however great, is held to be better than loss of life — what is called ' blood-guilti- ness,' however small. Such are, in fact, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 179 the political and social ideas of even (so- called) eminent statesmen at the present day in Great Britain. Some of our British statesmen of the modern school who have nothing but endless generations of industrialism in the blood and who cannot see or under- stand anything beyond themselves and their own little local, insular, parochial and class experiences, are sometimes ' as good as a play ' to watch, so like they are to the Newmarket jockey in Rome. This genius, being at the Carnival, saw the horses (which are raced without riders) come in. ' Look ! ' he cried out, ' how like these blessed furrineers ! Every d — d jockey tumbled orf.' And it is related that after his return to England he never to his dying day, neglected an i8o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Opportunity of holding forth on the ' impos- sibility of teaching them Eyetalians to stick on a horse.' Now we laugh at this but it is hardly more absurd than many a mani- festation of class narrowness, ignorance and prejudice on the part of some of our politi- cal gentlemen who are engaged in trade in provincial districts, in their insensibility to and ignorance about everything non- British, non-insular, and non-commercial. A word about Mr John Bright, the admirably eloquent denouncer of war. Few subjects are more curious to study than that of reversion to former ancestors, skipping immediate ones. Formerly all sheep were black. So now and then a black sheep is born in these days ; and no doubt a black sheep may be quite as good as a white one. Still it is a rever- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS i8i slon to an old type that existed many years ago, when all sheep were black. Mr John Bright was a curious Illustration of this principle. Though he, perhaps, had more English than Hebrew blood In him, he had In some respects reverted to his Hebrew ancestors, and to the Hebrew type of character. There was the same fine capacity for passion, the same narrow- ness, the same want of scientific precision, the same Intolerance, and the same sense of the necessity to men of morality and religion. Nearly all our Ideas about righteousness, morality and religion come from the Jewish race. ' Mankind,' says Goldwin Smith, ' owes more to the Hebrews than to any other race, Inasmuch as religion and morality (religion carried out l82 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR in practice) are more important than all science and art put together.' Mr Bright sacrificing his office under government to his principles was admir- able, especially for these days of political dishonesty. English orators are apt to be wanting In passion, but Mr Bright was a true Oriental in this respect. Mr Bright's power of vituperation has perhaps never been excelled. His curses of his enemies exceeded in grandeur anything that has been known in history since the days when the old Hebrew prophets poured out the vials of their wrath upon Og, King of Bashan, and Sehon, King of the Amorites. Besides the fine capacity for passion that was in him we must all admire in Mr Bright his genuine love of sport, SPORT. WAR AND MANLINESS 183 though, of course his characteristics accompany hnii here, too, such as his narrow intolerance of, and want of sympathy with, the sports of other people. If circumstances had made him a Scotch deer-stalker, he would have been shocked at any one wasting his time over the salmon fishing he loved so much. He was like the hunting man who lived in his boots, hunted six days a week, and thought nothing of riding thirty miles to cover. ' Look,' he said, contemplating some partridge shooters, ' look at those blooming idiots toiling over the turnip fields as if they were paid for it. Blessed if they shouldn't be shut up in Hanwell. Such a waste of time, too.' Happening to be present once at a meet of hounds, Mr Bright is reported to 184 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR have said ' Well I never saw so many idle people collected together at the same time before.' But in an industrial state of society it is of the very utmost importance, as it cannot be too often repeated, that all sorts of sport should be cultivated, in order to keep up the manliness without which a country must, sooner or later, succumb to some other one, and to counteract the effeminacy which mere industrialism always tends to produce. I repeat, that we cannot too much admire Mr Bright for his honest sacrifice of office to his peace principles, foolishly exaggerated as those principles were. But it is better to be honest and foolish than dishonest and sharp-witted. A copybook platitude no doubt. But all SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS i85 platitudes have become platitudes in con- sequence of their truth. Anything in the world may happen, so all war may cease, but history, science, and experience say the contrary. In- stead of wars coming to an end, they be- come more and more destructive as civili- sation increases. ' Yes,' says the dreamer of dreams, ' and that must put an end to war.' But this is another dream. How can good guns, that is, men fighting further off from each other than formerly, alter human nature. It would be as wise to say that good cooking will put an end to eating. War marches from the mere hunger- bred fightings of animals and savages, who are nearly incapable of combining or organising, up to the elaborate military 1 86 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR science of the present day. Amongst many savages, war with neighbouring tribes is almost unceasing. Then comes war varying infinitely in form, as man marches from barbarism ; till at length we come to the modern warfare of civil- ised nations, when instead of war mean- ing petty homicide and never-ceasing little predatory expeditions it means vast destruction for short periods, followed by more or less lengthy periods of peace and recuperation for war again. In civilised times there are longer periods of peace, but on the whole, war in- creases ; that is to say, more wealth is spent on war in a civilised nation in a hundred years than is spent on war by an equal number of savages in the same time. Mr Traill calls the late wars in the SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 187 Crimea and in France more tremendous than any of the conflicts mentioned in history. Perhaps the nearer the relationship between two nations the more is the chance of war. Mr G. Brooks, in 1886, stood as Home Rule candidate for Durham. But he went to America, and came back a Unionist. This is what he says about the matter. ' A few months ago I landed in the United States a pronounced Home Ruler ; a few weeks ago I left New York with my face turned towards Liberal Unionism. Whence the change, and why ? To put the matter in a sentence : my experience in the United States opened my eyes to the hostility which is there cherished and 1 88 HORSES. SPORT AND WAR cultivated towards this country, not only by the Irish in America, but by the bulk of the Americans themselves, and led me to the conclusion that it would be the height of folly to arm with constitutional powers, practically unlimited, a people who are hostile to us, and who would use those powers to our hurt wherever possible; and who, moreover, would be supported in such courses by a great nation on the other side of the Atlantic' And there are some who say that war between Great Britain and the United States is impossible, they being so nearly allied. People ignorant of human nature do not see that the nearer the alliance, the greater the love, the greater the jealousy and the greater the hatred on occasion. None love like the members SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 189 of the same family, but none hate like the members of the same family. ' They are like two brothers,' said some one to Rogers. ' Dear me,' he answered, ' you don't say so. I knew they did not get on well, but I did not know it was so bad as that.' Aristotle, two thousand years ago, said that the people who hate each other most, are the people who have most to do with each other. ' It is,' he said, ' the bricklayer that the bricklayer hates, not the blacksmith.' The most acrimonious of all wars are civil wars. The tendency of modern ultra-democracy seems to be to increase political party .and class malignity. Thence it will perhaps render civil war more probable than it is in less democratic states of society. Mr J. Cook, the American lecturer, pro- 190 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR phecies bloody civil wars in America some day between labour and capital, and other burning questions. Mr J. Burns, as stated in newspapers, lately alluded to the pro- bability of a bloody civil war in Great Britain between capital and labour. A writer in the Ediubwrgh Review^ on the ' fallacies of fair trade,' thinks that when America has paid off her last war debt she will no longer w^ant her great protective duties, and so she will adopt free trade. But if we go by history, when America has paid off her w^ar debt, she will embark in a new war. What inclines a nation to peace is, amongst other things a heavy national debt. The Americans are, perhaps, the most warlike nation that ever existed on the earth, and the most imperial - minded one. ' A war with SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 191 England,' said an American to IMr Hudson (author of ' A Scamper through America'), 'would make every working man in the United States a soldier.' In America, Washington, the capital, was laid out in streets radiating from a centre, the idea being that periodical revolutions and civil wars being inevitable, cannon at the centre would command all the streets. Some foolish people say that it is impossible there can ever be war between countries tied with so many ties as England and America. But w^ere not North and South in America tied together with a good many more ties before the last civil war ? In the war with Mexico, the United States got 20,000 volunteers in a fortnight; 192 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR in another fortnight they could have got 20,000 more. Walt Whitman says that the Americans are the most war-like people that have ever existed in the world. Therefore, if, in the course of years, some quarrel with this country should excite them, and the invasion of England be proposed, volunteers would offer themselves by hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Woe betide us then if in accordance with certain ideas of the day we have renounced our colonies, which, requiring as they do unceasing wars of some kind, keep us up to fighting mark ! Woe be- tide us then if cosmopolitanism has killed patriotism ! Woe betide us then if we have degenerated into a nation of mere industrialists, with a rich class made help- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 193 less by generations of luxury, and with a spoilt working class hanging on to Its Government's apron strings, unceasingly crying out helplessly to that Government for everything It wants, and getting It for Its vote's sake, and consequently deterio- rating more and more each generation In manliness, self-dependence, industry, and energy ! Woe betide us then, If with insular and Illusory self-congratulations and self-conceit we trust for our defences to natural advantages of position, such as 'the silver streak,' and to such defence alone ! What can silver streaks do In the long run against human passions, human ambitions, and human energies ? In the course of a few years vast steamships without number will be constantly crossing- the Atlantic, and for a country containing N 194 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR a hundred millions of inhabitants, to send over an army of five hundred thousand men will be just nothing — especially when assisted (if the West -Irish are to be governed according to West-Irish ideas) by a very largely increased population of semi-pauper, semi-barbarous Celtic, Finnish, or Iberian peasants (whatever the Irish of the West may be) in an island close to our shores, every peasant amongst them hating the English nation with all his soul and with all his strength. The old Prussian soldier, Bllicher, when first he saw London, exclaimed ' Mein Gott, was fur Plunderung ! ' So there will be something to fight for be- sides the satisfaction of hatred and race enmity. After all there will be one comfort SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 195 for the sanguine believer In the future of the human race, — that Is, If he takes very broad views. If England does be- come a nation of mere Quakerish Indus- trialists, with all manliness and Inde- pendent energy eliminated out, the sooner some race more fit to survive takes their place the better. The thing has happened before to the benefit of man- kind, and no doubt will again as long as the world lasts. The Americans are men. Industrialism has not yet turned them Into Quakers and women. Thus the Northern States decided that civil war was better than disintegration of the empire. Sentimental humanitarians say that separation and disintegration In an empire, are better than civil war. Mr M. Arnold propounds the wonder- 196 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ful doctrine that one advantage in Ameri- can institutions is that they render the country safe from revolutions or civil wars. Then he never heard of the re- volution and civil war to which I have just alluded of twenty years ago, between The North and South called the most bloody, destructive, and terrible civil war that ever took place in any country I No doubt Mr Arnold was primarily a poet or imaginative writer, but surely he might have acquainted himself with the great broad facts of history. Mr Jefferson, the American President, said, he expected and hoped that there would be a civil war in America at least every twenty years. Man, says science, has inhabited this earth millions of years, and during all SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 197 this time has been a fighting animal. At length, in these latter days come insular industrialists, who, having noth- ing in their blood but centuries of hereditary buying and selling, jump up on to their counters and cry out ' Oh dear me, what a dreadful thing fighting is ! It kills so many people ; and wounds hurt so much and blood is so shocking to see ; besides which, if people spend all thei7^ money on fighting they will have none left to buy my goods zuith,' etc., etc. The aim of Quaker-type people is more peace than poor human nature can bear without deterioration of breed. What since men have lived in the world has been nature's way when a high-type and a low-type race get in each other's way ? 198 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR The indisputable way has been to fight it out by free competition or war or both so, that the high-type race may survive. Men says science have Hved probably a million or so years on the earth. All this time the above system has been carried out, and thus mankind has risen above savagery. At length from a com- bination of industrialism and insularity, Quakers arose in the world and tried to repeal these laws of nature, saying and actually believing that Christianity has altered the whole thing. But Chris- tianity has not altered the whole thing. It is since Christianity that Red Indians and native Australians have died out to make way for higher races. Christianity is a militant religion and means eternal war against the disorder, unrighteousness, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 199 immorality, dishonesty, turbulence, and filth of savagery, In favour of the com- parative honesty, order, morality, and cleanliness of civilisation. Probably national cowardice and Quaker renunciation of even just war Is one of the signs of decadence In a nation. We all know that some of the peace-at- any-prlce party are excellent and well- meaning men. But they are totally ig- norant of human nature and of the gigantic forces of Indolence, disorder turbulence, and sense -pleasure-of- the -moment animalism that are always pulling civilisation back to barbarism, and according to history, successfully in the long run all nations having gone down when their time came. Generally these Quaker kind of people are ignorant of history, but If not, they 200 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR are without intelligence to read aright what history says. They know nothing of human nature as It is In reality but only as It is in Utopia. That is to say, they only know human nature as it is not. Of course, war means much pitiable suffering. So do hurricanes. Winds and hurricanes have destroyed millions. But no winds at all, by rendering air pesti- lential, would destroy millions of millions. So too no wars at all would end In the earth being given up to some wretched monkey- like man that happens to be most prolific. We must take our planet with its inhabitants, fightings, earthquakes, hurri- canes, and all as it is, not as Mercury or Venus is. Disbelief in war often comes from that SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 201 mental deficiency which makes stupid people without imaginative power unable to conceive a state of things different from what they experience at the moment or have been in the habit of experiencing. Young people who are stupid, cannot imagine ever becoming old and infirm. A stupid man shivering with cold cannot imagine warm summer weather. A stupid man miserable from poverty cannot im- agine a rich man being miserable. A stupid rich man often cannot imagine a poor man being happy. The average human mind has very limited powers. So we may see how a man who has with his progenitors, always lived In peace, ease and comfort, becomes at last hardly able to see anything else in the world. Most people, from want of imagination, 202 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR judge of others by themselves, and of other lives by their own. Thus they never can understand human nature in its infinite forms, varieties, and races. The civilised man, hereditarily accustomed to comfort and safety often cannot Imagine the tur- bulence that is In man. At the French Revolution the loungers of the Boulevards were too stupid to imagine anything different from their habitual easy-going lives. In a week their heads were In the guillotine basket. That extremely shrewd observer, good thinker, and atrocious poet, Walt Whit- man, says, as we have seen that the Ameri- cans are the most warlike people that ever existed. Whenever a war is ' on the carpet ' volunteers by the thousands upon thousands are forthcoming at once. It Is SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 203 believed that Irish Americans In America increase in numbers faster than Enghsh Americans. But the low-type Irishman hates the English, just as all low-type races hate high-type ones in the aggregate. Of course then they will encourage war with England, and vote for it ; but in an ultra Democracy where universal suffrage exists (even though the majority were to consist of nothing better than Australian savages) if war is voted, war must come. Again, though the low- type Irishman is incapable of organising, originating, leading or commanding, he fights extremely well if well led and well commanded, and in these days there are always plenty of clever educated, enter- prising scamps to do the leading. Probably the real meaning of civllisa- 204 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR tlon as regards war, has to do, not with lessening war, but with lessening the sufferings that accompany and follow war. History and science tell us that during the thousands upon thousands of years man has lived on this earth he has not only been a fighting animal, but more and more a fighting animal up to the present time. As man develops he becomes more warlike and more peaceful. He spends more on war, and appreciates more the blessings of peace. The more civilised man becomes the more gigantic and elaborate his wars are, and the more things he has to fight about. Savages care for nothing but women and food. Civilised men care for other things without end. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 205 It is true that some few more or less barbarous people never fight, but this arises from exceptional circumstances. For instance, the Lepchas, an Indian tribe, are, as Herbert Spencer tells us, what we may call a Quaker tribe. When they are attacked, Instead of fighting they run away, and live for a time In the jungle, where they are safe. xA.nother tribe, he says, Is safe from war because It can live in malarious districts, which are fatal to men of a superior breed. We are told that all such unwar-like people are as timid, flabby, and pitiable creatures as one would naturally expect them to be. The Chinese are a good Illustration of what comes of ages of mere industrialism without war. Though descended from warlike Tartars, ' They now,' says M. 2o6 EIORSES, SPORT AND WAR Letourneau, the French ethnologist, ' are effeminate, cowardly people, caring little for the Interests of their country.' When forced to fight against the English, their Mandarin Commander's chief care was that the soldiers should stuff their ears with cotton to prevent being deafened, and to stupify themselves with opium to give them courage ; and after all the cotton wool did not prevent them hearing our big drum, which they regarded as a terrible engine of war, and against which they therefore directed all their energies. ' In China,' again says M. Letourneau, ' the energetic Independent Mongolian has by ages of mere industrialism, subjection to state officials, (at which socialism aims everywhere) and contempt of every war- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 207 like profession, degenerated into the cowardly and servile Chinese.' Still there are different opinions about the Chinese of the future whatever they have been hitherto. A great general predicted that Russia will conquer all the old world and then China will conquer Russia. ' The Chinese,' said Lord Wolesley, * are the coming nation. Some day they will march westward. The Russians will go down before them. They will overrun India, sweeping us into the sea. Asia will belong to them. The government of China has hitherto been carried on by the Tartar rulers cutting off the heads of all men who showed themselves of more than average intelligence, activity, and energy. When 2o8 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Commissioner Leh was asked whether it was true that he had in three years be- headed sixty thousand men, he repHed, ' Oh surely many more than that.' Let us see what Sir Charles Dilke's ideas about war are. He thinks that the French Republic will end in a great war, that reason has nothing to do with wars — that nations fight from sentimental feelings and passions, — that the hatred of the French (in the aggregate) of England is a permanent racial fact, — that in the question of war we English are living in a fool's paradise, — that Russian invasion of India is only a question of time, and not a long time, — that Russia's power is enormous, in consequence of Russians being a rapidly increasing pa- triotic, homogeneous, religious race, who SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 209 Speak the same tongue, and have the same religion, — that the Russians expect to be masters of the world, and therefore will be a fighting nation for ever, that China will become a very powerful fighting nation, — that, even supposing parliamen- tary Institutions to tend towards the diminution of war, Asiatic races will never be governed by parliamentary institutions, etc. * Supposing,' said Bismarck, ' France and Russia crushed Germany who would be the sole gainer ? Russia to a certainty. She would next devour France. Germany is the bulwark of Western Europe against Russian invasion.' Fighting power can only be kept up by fighting. A cricketer, however good, if he discontinues to play the game, loses o 210 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR his power to play. A hunting man, if he discontinues to hunt, loses his courage to ride to hounds. Thus, a great country should always keep up Its fighting capa- city by fighting. Noble objects can never fail. The world, it seems, must always contain people, and races of people whose lives are lives of crimin- ality, cruelty, and savagery of every kind. Nature's plan and Christianity's plan for improving the world Is for such people (many of them more brutish than the brutes) to make way for people and races more fit to survive. I say ^ more brutish than brutes.' No brutes delight in cruelty and In torturing their fellow- creatures as do Asiatics, North Ameri- can Indians, and most other barbarous people. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 211 French wreckers used at night to tie a lantern to the horns of a bull and fasten his head to his fore legs. Then when he moved about it looked at sea like a ship's light moving up and down ; sailors thinking the land was open sea, ships ran on shore, were wrecked, and plun- dered. The lower animals are never such devils. In France, in 1885, the police at Chalon found crippled children begging. On inquiry, it turned out that they had been crippled purposely, to create compassion. Their limbs had been subjected to horrible tortures, and their flesh cut and per- manently scarred by corrosive liquid being poured on the wounds. The lower animals are never such devils. 212 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Nothing Is more strange than the shallowness and one-sidedness of the views commonly taken of Christianity. All talk of the beautiful feminine side, but who mentions the stern masculine side ? Who, for instance, has ever told us that Christianity teaches ' survival of the fittest ? ' The aim of nature is the survival of the best. ' Of the millions created,' says Mr H. Drummond, ' in any department of nature the number selected for preferment is small.' Christianity seems to say the same with regard to mankind. ' Many are called but few are chosen.' ' Wide is the gate that leadeth to destruction and many there be that go in thereat.' ' Cut down the unfruitful tree, why cumbereth it the ground.' ' The unprofitable servant SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 213 shall be cast out into outer darkness, etc' These are Oriental or metaphorical ways of expressing what modern science calls 'survival of the fittest.' Again, ^ he that hath to him shall be given, whilst from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.' Foolish people cannot see that Christianity has many sides. Better that a comparatively few brave, righteous, energetic, intelligent men should live to enjoy the bliss such men alone can enjoy than that millions of poor savage creatures should live the lives of brutes or lives lower than the brutes. Rajah Brooke destroyed Dyak pirates. A certain party in England called it a wicked sacrifice of human life. ' Sacrifice of human life!' cried Charles Kingsley, in righteous wrath. Tt was not human life. It was beast life.' 214 It is a fact that Christianity teaches that the evil must make way for the good, and that the majority of mankind are evil, whilst it is only the minority that go through the straight gate that leadeth unto life (wisdom and goodness). And who can say that Christianity is wrong in this teaching? ' Evil,' of course, means in the language of Christian countries evil compaixd with the Christian standard of good, that is purity, energy, pitiful- ness, hopefulness, joyfulness, trustfulness, honesty, righteousness, wisdom and holi- ness. From the point of view of mere science or 71167^6 observation and classification, all men are good in their places, just as toads, skunks, vipers, kangaroos, elephants, beavers, bees, butterflies, ante- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 215 lopes, etc., are all good in their places in nature. But science by itself is only science by itself, and so long as it is by itself it can lead to no preference of one thing over another — to no efforts at amendment. It only means seeing what is. Christianity on the contrary, besides seeing what is, strives at amendment by war, punishment, and destruction of the unrighteous amongst other means. * War,' said Bulwer, ' is at once the scourge and civiliser of mankind.' Emer- son, talking of the civil war in America, calls it ' our doleful instructor.' Again, he says, ' even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years. I shall always respect war hereafter.' No Quakerism here. No womanish whining 2i6 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR here about anything whatever, even national dishonesty or crime to any degree being better than war. ' War,' said Emer- son, ' Is better than our degrading and descending poHtlcs.' How about our poli- tics In England ? Have we no degraded and descending politics ? Have we no statesmen, who whilst they condemn In the strongest manner ' bloodguUtlness ' as they call It, have no hesitation In sacrificing truth, patriotism and every consideration of right, justice, and common honesty at a moment's notice, whenever there seems to be the slightest chance of gaining the smallest advantage, to some wretched political faction ; or of satisfying In the least degree their own egotism, vanity and ambition? The Christian martyrs suffered excruci- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 217 atlnof torments and deaths rather than sacrifice their convictions to popular opinions. Some of our modern statesmen seem to be the extreme opposites to the Christian martyrs in this respect. National rascality and unjust confiscation of property to any degree is better than bloodshed or civil war ! Any amount whatever of wickedness or dishonour is better than risking one's life by fighting ! Force is no remedy ! Ideas such as these are what we expect to find in a purely industrial part of any community. And our expectations are not disappointed. On the other hand, wise Edmund Burke said, ' Order in a country must be pre- served at any price. If the voice of the magistrate cannot do it, the constable must do it ; if the constable cannot do it, 2i8 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR the sword of the soldier must do It ; If It cannot be purchased without blood, It must be purchased by blood. Liberty ought not to exist In any country where peace and order are not observed.' So says wise Edmund Burke. ' Any amount of crime, turbulence, anarchy, and savagery whatever Is better than " bloodgulltlness ; " ' so says the senti- mental humanitarian of the day. A nation putting an end to war, means a nation being conquered by one that does not put an end to war. As I have said, Sir Charles Dllke attributes the enormous formldableness of Russia to that country containing sixty millions of homogeneous religious and patriotic people who speak the same language. But the formldableness of SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 219 Russia comes, also, from her increasing population. According to General StrelbltskI, Russia, by the normal increase of her population, will in 1937, have a popula- tion of 150,000,000. Is it conceivable that these vast and increasing hordes of people will ever be converted to Quakerism and peace at any price ? Then how can any other race of men ever become Quaker races and renounce war without ruin ? Some people, with nothing but analy- sing reasoning in them, think that wars must cease because war is unreasonable. But wars, as Sir Charles Dllke truly says, come from feeling and sentiment, not reason. This, In fact, is as a rule, the source of human action. 220 ' The actions of men,' says Herbert Spencer, ' come from their Inherited in- stincts, passions, and feehngs. Reason, where they have any, is used to justify and carry out the desires and actions.' If this is so, what chance will there be for peace between nations as they get more democratic, that is, ruled by the more ignorant, the more impulsive, and the more unreasoning classes. A vierely industrial state of society where the fighting principle has not been kept up, ends in imbecility of character, and passive helplessness before attacks from more manly people abroad, or revolu- tionary classes at home. M. Taine tells us of a Marseilles gentleman who was proscribed during the French revolution. ' He provided himself with sabre and fire- SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 221 arms which he always carried about him, and was left unmolested.' If all the more respectable classes had consisted of men like him, instead of the effeminate, weak wretches they were, there would have been no French revolution, which as M. Taine says, was, at bottom, simply the successful rising of the criminal classes, — successful^ in consequence of the cowardice, imbecility, and virtuelessness of the other classes. Cowardice, vice, and weakness, all run in harness together. Again we are told, that during the Massacre of St Bartholomew only two men offered any resistance. They had all been effeminised and rendered imbecile by years of peace and luxury. One use of war is as a safety-valve. In all countries there are a certain number of 22 2 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR very restless spirits ; so restless, that if they have not war abroad to take part in, they stir up anarchies of some kind at home. Some of these men are great scoundrels, some fine fellows in their way. Thus war abroad is one of the safety- valves against revolution at home. If there is in a nation nothing but the effeminacy, timidity and love of ease that comes of exclusively industrial habits that nation's life is built on sand. ' The floods will come ' sooner or later, and ' great will be the fall thereof ' Ever since the days,' says Charles Kingsley, 'of the Persians of old, effemi- nacy has always gone hand in hand with cowardice and dishonesty. To the neglect of exercises such as sports in peace and war at times, which call out SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 223 fortitude, self-dependency and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity and the utter want of a high sense of honour which is increasinof amono^st the middle classes.' Many people think that the world has progressed since the days of the ancient Persians. It may be so ; still it may not be so. 'In Persia, from early boyhood,' as we are told by Xenophon, ' everything was done to encourage healthy vigour of mind and body. After seven years of age the boy was taught to ride, and to go a- hunting. After fourteen, his education was transferred to four men, namely, a wise man, a righteous man, a temperate man, and a valiant man. The first taught him to be religious, the second to be 2 24 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR honest, the third, to be temperate, and the fourth to despise danger.' Now let US see w^hat the modern British IndustrlaHst's Ideas are apt to be about these things. They often seem to be somewhat as follows : — (i) That little children should be kept poring over books till they get water on the brain. (2) That Instruction In religion and morality, is a waste of time. (3) That old Ideas about honesty and justice are superstition, Inas- much as adulteration of goods is only a justifiable form of competition ; honesty, or rights of property are not rights at all, and contracts and solemn written promises ought not to be considered binding. (4) That religion is folly, and a revller of all religion and morality Is SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 225 as fit a man for a legislator as any one else. (5) That courage Is a heathen quality, not wanted In Industrial states of society, In which criminality, treason, and rebellion should be treated by con- cession and by giving the criminals, traitors, and rebels all they demand ; never using force, Inasmuch as ' force Is no remedy.' I myself think the ancient Persian Ideas far the highest. Talk about progress Is endless, but whether the moral and spiritual state of man during one period of a thousand years Is higher than In another period of a thousand years, no one can say. Each era takes Its own standard (for It knows no other) and thence draws conclusions to Its own advantage ; but the truth Is diffi- cult to know. 2 26 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR How can we compare our present civilisation with the civiHsations that existed, perhaps, five or ten thousand years ago ? And what is five thousand years in the Hfe of a planet ? And who can tell at any one time whether his planet is getting more or less fit for sentient and intelligent life on it ? Again, what can we know about the civil- isation of old countries that now lie hundreds of fathoms down at the bottom of oceans, and that will some day emerge again and play their part for ages in the form of chalk hills growing turnips. Mr Galton thinks that we are to the ancient Greeks in progress and civilisation only as Australian savages are to lis. Sir John Lubbock seems inclined to agree with him. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 227 The middle-class dreamers about a future millennium of universal peace, and undisturbed money-making without war, are like M. Littre, the Comtist. ' The genius of M. Littre,' says a writer in the Edinbttrgh Reviezv, ' was merely analytic. We trace in him no power of constructive reasoning. On the con- trary, he was apt to mistake mere phan- tasms for the laws that govern society. I'hus, in 1850, he announced that peace would reign in future. In 1879, he was obliged to confess that all his forecasts were mere delusions. In the interval, four wars had broken out. So it is with all the Utopian, industrial, peace-at-any- price politicians ; and they are quite reason-proof. A war breaks out stulti- fying all their theories and dreams. 228 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ''True," they say, "war it is. Still this, at any rate, is the last war there ever will be ; " and so, no doubt, such people will go on for ever. Their inferences are all false, because their premises are false. Having no knowledge of what human nature is, they cannot foresee. They live on theories, and are dead to reason, facts, wisdom, history, and truth. All the surprise expressed by Quaker kind of folk at the turbulence and disorder that is unceasingly going on in the world in general, and latterly in Ireland in particular, comes from their incapacity to understand what human nature is, and that war, of some kind, is unceasingly necessary on this earth to keep down the savagery that is unceas- ingly at work, — savagery whether of SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 229 criminal classes at home, or low-type races of men anywhere.' ' Atheism and Agnosticism,' says Mr Percy Greg, ' may put an end to war in a country by making men too cowardly to fight.' If a man has no patriotism, and no unselfish or Christian passions of any kind, of course he will be too cowardly to fight. Nobody devotes him- self without a motive. Any nation that has no beliefs and that renounces patriotism and the higher motive forces, will necessarily be at the mercy of any and every other one that has not renounced these nobler passions, and whose inhabitants, therefore, are not cowards. Agnosticism has to do not only with belief in God. It means scepticism of 30 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR nature and negation of belief in anything that cannot be seen or mathematically proved. Thence comes the negation of motive force for anything. What mathe- matical proof, asks the man of sceptical mind. Is there that patriotism Is right ? None. Of course then he will not fight for his country. The smug agnostic In an Industrial state of society, who has no notion that beliefs and non-beliefs have any practical effect on conduct, no doubt thinks himself highly enlightened, but Is he the most fit person to survive on this earth? Agnosticism, whatever Its merits, is a negation — a negation of one or more of the most active vitalities. It is the negation of some of the strongest motive forces. Sir Charles Dilke, as we have SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 231 seen, says that one reason why Russia is the most powerful of nations Is, that the majority of Russians are reHglous men who beHeve In God. Agnosticism may be a very nice state of mind, but If It leads to men being killed In war by men who are not Agnostics, It would almost look as if Agnostics are not the fittest of all people to survive on the earth. Still our Agnostics will have the comfort, In their last moments of congratulating themselves on their free- dom from the erroneous dogmas of the poor superstitious creatures who have shot them, so they, perhaps, will die happy. There can be no doubt that religious belief is one of the conditions that make men and nations fittest to survive. Agnosticism means the resultant of mei^e intellectual criticism and analysings; and 232 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR this is only negative. No action can come of it. By itself it means death in life. It is the opposite to passion, desire or motive force. It cannot even make a man eat. Given nothing else and he will starve to death. The passion of hunger comes, — at once he eats and lives. Agnosticism means negation of faith in all that cannot be proved logically or mathematically. But in matters connected with life and living creatures, nothing can be so proved. Why should I shake hands with my friend ? What mathematical proof is there that he is my friend — that in fact he does not hate me ? There is no possible proof, so our Agnostic (if he is consistent and believes in nothing that cannot be mathematically proved) passes his life without a friend. Why should I SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 233 not Steal, why should I not lie, why should I not be heartless, selfish and cruel? It can- not be proved mathematically that cruelty is essentially worse than mercy, good than evil. There is nothing but proofless, Instinctive faith that these things are so, says the Agnostic — and the Agnostic Is right. There is no mathematical proof. Unfortunately he finds himself hanged some day. Why should we fight for our country, say Its Inhabitants, when that country's day for heartless, hopeless, faithless criti- cism, and mere analytic and critical maun- dering has come ? We want to make money, and to have plenty to eat and drink. There Is no mathematical proof that belief in God or love of country are not mere false and foolish Instincts. And 234 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR they are right. There is no mathematical proof. Unfortunately some day they find their country invaded, conquered and ruined, and another civilisation wiped out of the history of the world. Being unfit to survive on this earth they cease to survive. The truth is men live entirely by faiths not by proofs. If they 'wait for' proofs, they die in the waiting and that soon. ' Among the higher races of men,' says Froude, ' courage has always been con- sidered an essential of a fine character.' But courage in a purely industrial com- munity is not immediately a paying virtue. Money can be made without it. Now this Quakerism would have at any rate some- thing to say for itself if all other nations agreed to become Quaker nations too, but SPOF>lT, WAR AND MANLINESS 235 till they do (and they certainly never will) Quaker nations will have to go to the wall sooner or later. Of course the highest kind of courage, that, namely, that goes along with duty, morality, and the highest forms of re- ligious belief, Is most efficient In war. But lower forms of religiousness, such as superstition and fanaticism, sometimes make men splendid fighters In their way. At any rate it Is not mere passive, negative, maundering agnosticism. The fanatic, is, at any rate, a man, not a mere notion-monger. A foolish critic of mine accused me of hating the industrial middle-classes. He might as well talk of a man hating his stomach that supplies him with the blood that flows in his veins. Of course 236 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR the Stomach is not the most exalted organ, but it is the most essential one. A man can, at any rate, live without any understanding, as we see every day, but without a stomach he dies at once. Thus industrialism without being the most exalted function of a nation, is the most essential one. Men 7nust have the necessaries of life, and a nation must have wealth if it is to be safe from in- vasion and conquest. Instead of hating the middle - class industrialists I only classify them, and describe their general peculiarities — overlooking exceptional people who belong to them, and always bearing in mind that classes are unceas- ingly merging themselves into each other, some men going up, some down. Shakespeare and Moliere came from SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 237 the industrial middle-class. The former was the son of a country shopkeeper, the latter of an upholsterer. We all know the horror some poli- ticians have of responsibilities and the risks of war to which they lead ; but responsibilities are good things, not bad, for they give birth to energy and life instead of death. To struggle is the law of nature that prevents deterioration, and keeps up the standard of character in the individual persons that compose a nation, and thence of the nations in the aggregate. Of course struggle and fight- ing often end in immediate failure. But the greatest ultimate successes have often been the greatest immediate failures, as for instance, Christianity. ' Even Jingoism,' says Mr S. Laing, 238 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ' which Is only another name of patriotism run mad, Is more respectable than the opposite extreme of a sordid and narrow parochialism which shrinks behind the " silver streak," measures everything by the standard of pounds, shillings, and pence, and with what Tennyson calls " The craven fear of being great," groans over the responsibilities of extended em- pire." The growth,' he goes on to say, ' of such a spirit amongst some of the advanced Liberal school seems to me one of the most alarming symptoms of the day.' Men who are merely peace worshipping Industrialists aiming solely at material comfort and money making belong to a type so different from the opposite kind of people that they never can and never will agree. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 239 Take this one question of peace alone, and consider what is thought about it by the two extremes of educated human nature — the materiaHst and the man whose thoughts dwell more on the spiritual or living side. The nieix materialist has from the fact of his being a viere materialist no motive power except the desire to gratify the senses. Having then no objects beyond gratification of the senses, ease, comfort, and material well-being, he naturally con- demns war or anything else that may lead to his beinof shot. But the man of the opposite kind takes a totally different view. He believes that the mere gratification of the senses is not worth very much ; that our business in the world is the mani- festation, the development, and the im- 240 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR provement of character ; that life and highest happiness mean energy ; that diffi- culty is its field, and it is happiness to overcome the difficulty ; that the proverbs ' No pains, no gains,' and ' No sweat, no sweet,' are wise proverbs ; that ' the uses of adversity are sweet ; ' that Christianity is a manly religion and teaches us ' to endure hardness ; ' that too much ease and luxury lead to spiritual death or stag- nation ; that human nature can stand bullets better than beer; that self-devoting patriotism is infinitely nobler than the love of ease and the gratification of the senses ; that active unselfishness Is the best thing, whilst love of material well- being for oneself, however good as far as it goes, is comparatively nothing ; that, according to history, ease, luxury, and SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 241 riches are more fatal to nations than war ; that human Hfe means something more than ' beer and skittles ; ' and, finally, that as far as the teaching of history hitherto goes, that the way the human race has escaped degeneration has been for the stronger and more virtuous races and people to take the places of the weak, vicious, and effeminate ones by fighting, or free competition, or both. Now, I ask, how^ can these two classes of men possibly come to an agreement on the question of peace and war ? How can we expect the man who looks upon human life as a field for energy, and for undertaking Instead of avoiding responsibilities In a good cause — who considers that just as ' it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,' so It is better to have tried Q 242 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR and failed than never to have tried at all ; and who even recognises that some of the greatest real successes in the history of the world have been the greatest failures if only judged by immediate worldly success, comfort and ease — I say how can such a man as this possibly agree with the man whose only thought is to live a life of comfort and smug content. The Spectator newspaper contrasting the comfort-loving materialist's ideal with the Christian's ideal says, 'we wish the Church congress would give a day to that forgot- ten subject the hardnesses of Christianity. There are plenty in Nature, and the Churches will discover that there are plenty in Christian Truth. Man luas not created only to be snmg. According to typical Quakerish industrialism as well as SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 243 much socialism and radicalism, man is created only to be ' smug.' The passive pleasures are of course good in their place and degree, just as repose and recreation are good in their places, but happiness means joy in action and varies as energy. Sydney Smith is a charming writer in his way, but he tends too much to the over estimation of mere material comfort. Talking of the ' Journey of life,' he says, ' some come forth for it, girt and shod and mantled, to walk on velvet lawns and smooth terraces, where every gale is arrested and every storm tempered.' And then he passes to the opposite contrast of those who ' walk over Alpine paths of life and buffet the storms,' etc. ; all the time evidently think- 244 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ing that the former Hfe is the happiest. But it is not the happiest ; for it tends to luxury, apathy, and death, in opposi- tion to Hfe and energy. Joy, I repeat, varies as energy. High happiness does not mean negative and passive pleasures, but positive and active ones. It is not the tepid and warm bath but the ice cold one that makes a healthy man half mad with life and exhilaration. In the animal world unhappiness is almost an unknown thing. The lower animals pass their lives struggling and fighting for existence and for the means of existence, and therefore are happy, whilst the more passive and indolent and therefore less happy ones get eaten up by their stronger friends and neighbours at an early period of their lives. Ants, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 245 It Is true, live In communities and lay up riches like men. We are told by natur- alists that a wealthy community of ants when It has laid up goods for many years will set Itself to work to eat, drink, and be merry. This goes on for a time, but gradually they become Indolent, vicious, luxurious, and dissipated, and therefore wretched and weak, till at last they are conquered and killed or con- verted Into slaves by some more active and energetic tribe. Thus is the de- terioration of the ant world prevented. This may be looked upon as a con- cise history of mankind, as well as of ants. Of course this Is only another way of saying the old saying that ' righteousness exalteth a nation, and sin Is the destruc- 246 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR tion of any people.' People talk much of the philosophy of history, but this is the philosophy of history, and the only essential one. Much low politics of- the day means the worship of ease and comfort at the expense of everything noble. It means, as Mr Laing puts it, ' counselling ignoble ease rather than noble effort.' Cowardly shrinking from all high undertakings for fear that ease and comfort should be diminished ! ' There cannot be,' says Mr Laing, ' a vainer dream than to imagine that it is possible for England to live alone harmless and inoffensive, a Quaker amongst nations.' Cowardice, if not the worst of vices, is the most despicable one. ' What is known,' says Mr Laing ' by the homely SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 247 name of ''pluck" Is the foundation of all real greatness of character.' ' Nations,' says J. A. Froude, ' are as it were enlarged school-boys fighting for supremacy either at home or abroad. These are nature's method,' he says ' of disciplining human character. Out of such struggles great men and great nations have risen, and as far as we know greatness cannot be purchased at a lower price.' Sir W. Grove, In a lecture which he delivered on Friday week at the Royal Institution, laid It down that ' the principle of resistance or war in Nature, which he called " antagonism," was essential to the economy of the universe, and must therefore, In the long run, be beneficial. We thought so much of force that we 248 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR underrated the value of repulsion, without which even the stars could not keep their places, and forgot that, without resistance motion could not be. Even light Is antagonised by the ether through which it passes, and It Is possible that heat, as It decays In the universe, may be regenerated by collisions.' Sir William carried his theory also Into the living world, and pointed out that ' all living things fought with other living things, even the bacteria In the blood, or with resisting difficulties, and that the result of the strain was often visibly beneficial, — • rabbits, for instance, being healthiest where food is scarce, and takes effort to obtain It. In short, antagonism Is as natural, as useful, and therefore as much a decree of God, as motion, usIuq; that word to SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 249 express every kind of beneficial energy. It Is a doctrine the advocates of progress do not like, but there is one grand comfort about it. The world will never lack "antagonism," nor is there the smallest evidence that the quantity decreases. It Is pleasant even for politicians to think that under this law Irish resistance may not be pure evil, but essential to England's political energy.' ' War,' says the Quaker, or industri- alist's view of Christianity, ' Is unchristian.' But ' war,' says Professor Seely, ' is not unchristian, Christianity is not the emas- culate sentimental thing it is sometimes represented to be. Selfish hatred Is In- deed charmed away but no less fiery passions take its place.' Some confused people think that be- 250 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR cause the word * peace ' Is often used in the New Testament, therefore Christianity means the absence of war. But this ' peace ' has nothing to do with the foohsh IndustrlaHst's millennium when there is to be no -more fighting to interfere with his money making. It has nothing to do with the eternal war which must for ever be waged between civilisation and savagery abroad as well as savagery (criminal classes) at home. Perpetual peace could end in nothing but the earth being given over In the long run to some poor apish creature that happened to be most prolific. This, I say, is not the peace meant in the New Testament. The peace meant is ' the peace of God,' as it is sometimes called, that is holiness, or a life no longer agitated by foolish vanities, by SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 251 foolish ambitions or inordinate craving for popularity, or ' the praise of men,' by co- vetousness, and selfishness, — a life, that is, at peace ; a life founded on duty or passion to do the will of God (as discovered by studying the laws of nature) together with active delight in nature and in all things that are good, true and beautiful ; and all this without regard to self. A man can en- joy nothing thoroughly above his dinner if he is thinking about himself. He is anxious and restless. He is without the ' peace of God.' To attain this peace we might well adopt the motto of ' peace at any price,' for it is worth any price. But all this is incomprehensible to the poor materialist of the genuine kind. He has nothing in himself to enable him to believe such characteristics to be possible 252 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR to men or even desirable if possible. And yet it is only Christianity. There will some day be a grand awaken- ing of the British industrial and Quaker mind from its dreams of a universal eternity of hucksterings, barterings and adulterat- ings in peace and quietness for ever and ever. What forms it will take none can say. Democracies, carried beyond what poor human nature will bear, are necessarily ignorant, illiberal, impulsive, reckless about expenditure, short-sighted, dishonest, un- just, uncontrolled, and violent, so they are warlike on occasion and very queer occasions they will be sometimes. The French Celt of the uncultivated classes is especially ignorant, illiberal, impulsive, uncontrolled, and inflammable. Who can say that the whole French nation may SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 253 not, any day, cry out with one voice for war with England, not one man of them in a thousand knowing anything whatever of the rights of the matter that is exciting him or the probable outcome of the war he cries out for. Wars, as Sir Charles Dilke says, come not from knowledge and reason, but from sentiment. Horace Walpole talks of ' that momentary frenzy that sometimes seizes a whole nation as if it were a vast animal.' Again in the middle ages hordes of Eastern people used to swarm over Europe massacring all before them. Are our Quaker-type politicians and men whose blood is made of generations of mere industrialism cer- tain that nothing of this sort will ever happen again ? The hordes are in the East in greater and more rapidly increas- 254 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR ing quantities than ever, and every year acquiring more and more the use of modern arms. What has happened once may happen again, Inasmuch as human nature is human nature for ever and ever. Then there are civil wars. According to some American prophets two bloody ones are hanging over the United States of America ; (i) On the question between universal suffrage and restriction of the suffrage ; (2) Between communism or socialism, and property. Joseph Cook the American lecturer seems to expect these wars, perhaps soon, perhaps not for fifty or a hundred years ; but what are a hundred years In a nation's history ? Then how about the negro race In America proving more prolific than the whites. If this should turn out to be the case, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 255 can we conceive the whites allowing the finest parts of their country to be turned over to the poor monkey-men with the inevitable relapse to African savagery ? Then, how about civil war in Great Britain, between property and socialism. Nearly all the lower classes, that is the classes below respectable working men, are socialistic in their hearts whether they know the meaning of the word or not. And how about the Continent ? In France, and in fact all the Latin races, in Europe and America, Socialism of one kind or another brings about periodic civil wars or revolu- tions ; but now Germany is threatened too. There are, it seems, already 700,000 socialist voters in the German towns — men who want all capital to be confiscated and every business in the country to be under- 256 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR taken and managed by the Government. Many of these will, no doubt, be only the well-meaning, half crazy, Utopia-dreaming socialists we find everywhere, but perhaps there may be a different explanation of the rest. German towns are full of men of Jewish blood, and so prolific is the race that the numbers increase rapidly. Now it is easy to imagine that the Jews ' of the baser sort ' may try to bring about socialism from the field it would open out to men with the special Hebrew gifts and talents. The State or Government becoming, through general confiscation, the universal landlord according to the socialist programme, would mean an infinitely complicated system of clever organisation, jobbery, tyranny, despotism (and thence slavery), scheming, swindling, and robbery, quite SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 257 Infinite In Its possibilities to men with the special Hebrew characteristics. Surely the Teutonic part of the German people will not allow, without a fight for it, this return to the barbarous, socialistic systems of the dark ages, with their inevitable accompaniments of destruction to liberty and Independent energy, of deterioration In character to every man, woman, and child, of survival of the unfittest, and of the terrible periodic famines and diseases that, according to history, always accom- pany, and, according to common sense, always must accompany socialistic forms of society. There has never been any indication that the Jews, as a race, have ever risen to the idea of liberty, and they have always tended towards socialism from Karl Marx and Lassalle downwards. R 258 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR Perhaps few people admire the Jews so much as I do. Some of their quaHties are admirable and cannot be rivalled by men of other blood. Still their political ideas seem generally to belong to social- istic or semi-slavery stages of develop- ment before liberty had been invented by Englishmen. The causes for war amongst civilised nations are endless. Wars arising from Imperialism or desire for the greatness of one's country will doubtless never cease in the world. The last civil war in America was such a war in a very great degree. No doubt, Mr Gold win Smith says, that if anyone of the Northeners had been asked what he was fighting for, he would have said ' for the law ; ' and very likely he would, SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 259 but It would have been a lie. What he fought for was Imperialism. He fought to prevent loss of territory, and quite right too; not that the South was necessarily wrong : but it was doubtless a case for fighting. Nothing else could settle the question. The Northerner, Walt Whitman, said that the war was not, on the side of the North, primarily to abolish slavery but to prevent secession — that is a war for Imperialism. ' The North/ said Lord Russell, ' fought for dominion,' that is Imperialism. Of course the slavery ques- tion had very much to do with the matter, but the North would not have been successful without the more powerful motive force of Imperialism in addition. Probably, as I have said, a great country like England ought to spend ten 2 6o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR millions more a year on the army and navy than she does. Much of the money could be got by putting as heavy duties on the useless luxuries of sugar, wine, and silk, as there already are on tobacco and tea. Besides silk and sugar being useless luxuries, the latter is, if doctors are to be believed, a pernicious one. To tax tobacco (a poor man's luxury) higher than sugar, silk and wine (the luxuries of the well-to-do) must surely come from that illogical unwisdom that is proverbial in the government of nations. ' Ouam parva sapientia vmndiLS giivernatiir' says the well worn saying. Again some of the ten millions might be saved by putting some check on the expenses of our Peruvian system of state-socialism that SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 261 Is increasing so every year, which system ended so disastrously to ancient Peru. Perhaps It will take a few hundred years to settle the question, what mode of taxation Is best for nations under modern conditions. One nation is out- competed and ruined by another, but the world learns. It Is only by experience that political lessons are ever learned. The merely industrial or Quaker mind tends to the condemnation of violent crime and all violent doings like war, but the condonation of mean forms of dishonesty that do not come under the head of direct theft. The average human mind is a confused set of pro- cesses and often cannot see things to be essentially Identical If their forms or names differ, as In the cases of direct 262 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR and Indirect theft. Many a petty In- dustrialist whilst he will refrain from direct theft will steal Indirectly by adulterating goods or swindling in some way, still thinking himself an honest man. But this is only confusion of mind. A clear seeing man knows that such a man is simply a thief. Charles Reade calls a man who will neither pay his rent nor quit his hold- ing a malefactor. As a fact he is simply a common thief who is stealing what is money's worth. Stealing money and stealing money's worth are equally thieving, and in either case the thief is equally a member of the criminal classes. So It is with all swindlers and adulterators of goods and obtalners of money under false pretences. Though SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 263 thieves indirectly they are simply thieves. The indirect thief will often be a worse man than the direct thief The former is a deliberate and scheming or diabolic thief, whilst the latter is only a brutal thief like a dog that steals another dog's bone. War means force. But, says the late Mr J. Bright and his party, ' force is no remedy.' Why, you poor foolish people, cannot you see that you as members of an orderly society have been using force or war all your lives as a remedy against burglary, theft, murder, and crime of all kinds ? But perhaps you do not call hanging a man, or sending him to prison and making a slave of him there using force. In truth the cost of the war (or force as a remedy) 264 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR which you as members of a civlhsed country have all your lives been helping by payment of your taxes to wage against the criminal classes in England is as we learn from Mr Howard Vincent ^6,000,000 a year. And a standing army of 74,000 persons are engaged in prosecuting this war in detection and punishing of crime — in making use of ' force as a remedy.' It is proverbial that Orientals only understand force. But this only means that low-type people whether at home or abroad only understand force, and can be made to behave decently only by force. ' Orientals,' said the news- paper Truth in 1883, 'only understand force. Arabi is powerful for the moment SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 265 because he Is in the eyes of the Egyptians the representative of force.' So also amongst low-type weak char- actered races of West or South Ireland. The Land and National Leagues have been powerful because they were the representatives of force, whilst the law till lately was only the representative of weakness. Let us see what Sir G. Cornewall Lewis said about force or war as a remedy against crime. ' Governments,' he said, ' exist by force, and that force ultimately is the sole check on wrong-doers, Is equally certain. The existence and administra- tion of a criminal law are necessary to the existence of a State, and no criminal law can be carried Into effect without the means of applying constraint to those 266 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR who Infringe It. The criminal walks willingly to the gaol and the scaffold, well knowing that. If he does not go with his will, he will be forced to go against It. The cases, therefore In which force is act2ially applied are not many ; and, as the effect of the law authorlslno; the use of force Is to render Its use un- necessary, It has been thought that force Is of little benefit In civilised societies and might be banished from the resources of government, although it is in fact the key-stone on which all government must ultimately rest.' No more false and foolish saying was ever uttered than the saying that ' force is no remedy.' Liberty In a country rests entirely on force. Without force or law to punish SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 267 crime, homicide, and theft, nobody would have liberty to do business or to walk outside the walls of his house. Without safety to life and property there can be no liberty, and this safety cannot be secured without force — without war. To talk of war or force coming to an end is nonsense. Even in countries where purest indus- trialism reigns, war Is, as I have said, unceasing, — war between civilisation and savagery — between the respectable classes and the criminal classes, that is between comparatively developed men and men whose development has been arrested at barbarism more or less, or who have reverted back to it. Advanced negro tribes are always waging war against marauding, thieving, murdering tribes of lower type. When 268 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR taken, the men of the latter are killed, tortured, or made slaves of. So also In civilised England, the com- paratively respectable part of the com- munity wages unceasing war with her barbarous or criminal classes. When taken they are hanged, flogged, or made slaves of for seven, ten, or twenty years, or for life as the case may be. The difference is only in form. All civilisation above the lowest savagery rests on force or successful war. 'The vice and injustice of the world,' says Ruskin, ' are con- stantly springing anew and are only to be subdued by battle,' not by concession, not by cowardice, not by cowering before turbulence, not by conniving at ill-doing, but by battle — by war — by force, which In such cases is often a complete remedy 269 and the only one possible. ' A rioter and a communist,' says Joseph Cook, the American lecturer, ' are enemies of the human race ; and if they defy the law, a republic must treat them as Napoleon treated them when he closed the French Revolution by grape shot. So says an American Republican. The sentiment- alists and many socialist radicals say, ' the rioter, the Irish murderer, and the thief or communist may or may not be mistaken people, but to use force to them is wicked, for it ends in blood guiltiness, and it is better to concede anything and everything than be guilty of bloodshed. Crime, however great, is better than bloodshed however small' Once, many years ago in the reign of Turpin, there appeared at the window of 270 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR a carriage, in which a man and his wife were travelHng, a masked face, accom- panied by the good old formula, ' Your money or your life.' The male traveller at once seized his blunderbuss but his wife shrieked out — ' For God's sake don't fire or there'll be blood guiltiness ; give them your money, give them all you have — con cede eve lyth ing. ' The Quaker or industrial idea of an earthly Paradise is an eternity of material ease and comfort and commerce, without war, without force, without manly re- creation, without sports, without heroism, without nobleness or greatness of any kind, without beauty and without, what Ruskin calls ' the splendour of life.' In fact, a sempiternal low dead-level of mean, colourless, broad - brimmed thee-and-thou SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 271 Quakerism, even though the actual broad brims with all the ' thees ' and ' thous ' might themselves cease out of the land. ' Force ' says Quaker-Industrialism ' Is no remedy.' Well there Is nothing new In It. It has always been the maxim of cowardly people since the world was created. When a man's life Is attempted by a scoundrel there are only two things to be done — use force or run away, and In fact the brave man does use force and the coward does run away. It Is the same between two countries, when one Is civil- ised and the other barbarous. It Is also the same between the respectable and the turbulent and criminal classes In every country. At the great French Revolution the more respectable and civilised part of the population ran away, so the criminal or 272 more barbarous classes took their place as M. Talne says. History and science tell us that the world Is for the most fit to survive, (that Is, for the most energetic, courageous, Intelligent and the righteous) and not for cowards. ' The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but the righteous Is bold as a Hon' says the Hebrew writer. But the industrial modern Briton of the Quaker type says, ' The right eoits flee when no man pursueth, but the wicked Is bold as a lion. ' Anything,' says the Quakerish peace- worshipper, Is better than bloodshed. But anything Is not better than bloodshed. National crime, such as stealing money from one class and giving It to another, or a government refusing to govern and punish ruffians, thieves, and murderers Is SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 273 not better. Any one who says it is is like a man who, seeing a brute torturing a child or a woman, stands looking calmly on and says ' I wish that man would stop doing this ; I could no doubt make him stop, but that might lead to strife, and anything in the world is better than blood- guiltiness.' Now such a vile wretch is unfit to live on the earth. When a community breaks out against a Government, joins in a body the criminal classes, and betakes itself to lawlessness, theft, and outrage, civil war in many cases will be right, or in other words, in accord- ance with the laws of nature, that is, the laws of God. Civil war is, as I say, infinitely better than national crime and dishonest and unjust conduct; and 'better' means s 274 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR according to science, more expedient or conducive to civilisation, prosperity and happiness in tJie long run and on the zvhole. Civilised man is developed from savage man, and civilisation is always on the brink ready to topple over if Govern- ments fail in their duty, and allow dis- order and crime to take the place of law and order. This toppling over to savagery took place at the French Re- volution in consequence of the imbe- cility of the Government and the suplne- ness, effeminacy and cowardice of what ought to have been the respectable classes. The same kind of rising on a small scale has been taking place In Ireland. Disorderly, predatory, and homicidal SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 275 low-type savages ; predatory, disorderly, and homicidal low-type criminal classes in civilised countries ; disorderly, pre- datory, and homicidal Finns, Iberians, low-type Celts or whatever may be the race or races of the poor Aboriginal people who live in South and West Ireland, — all these are people whose moral or intellectual development or both has been arrested at a low stage, or who have reverted back to that stage : and the way to deal with them is amongst other ways by force or war, wherever they come in contact with and oppose themselves to civilised men. The war between these two powers is in fact eternal. Sometimes civilisation gets the best of it, sometimes savagery. Wherever civilisation neglects to make 276 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR use of force as a remedy against savagery, savagery at once makes use of force as a remedy against civilisation. ' La sauvagerle,' says Salnte-Beuve, 'est toiijours la a deux pas, et des qu'on lache pled elle recommence.' Again he says, ' rien de plus prompt a balsser que la civilisation — on perd en trols semalnes le resultat de plusleurs slecles. La civili- sation est une chose apprise et Inventee. Les hommes apres quelque annees de palx oubllent cette verlte ; lis arrlvent a croire que la culture est une chose Innee ; qu'elle est la meme chose que la nature.' Few consider how near savagery Is behind civilisation. ' Scratch a Russian,' they say, ' and you find the Cossack.' It was said formerly when debtors were SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 277 Imprisoned for years In the King's Bench, that however refined their habits had been, In a very short time these habits vanished and they relapsed Into those of mere lazy, dirty, eating, drinking and sleeping savages. The thousands upon thousands of years of savagery In the blood was stronger than the few years of civilisation. ' Self love,' says Shake- speare, ' is not so vile a sin as self neglect- ing.' And yet these prisoners soon became contented to live In this state of vile ' self neglecting.' Such Is poor human nature. There Is not only an unceasing war and opposition going on in the world at large between civilisation and savagery, but the war Is always going on In each civilised person more or less. The in- 278 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR dolence, love of comfort, of ease, and of the sense-pleasure of the moment of our savage ancestors, is always pulling every- one back towards the state from which w^e all came, and in millions of instances with success. In nations the same thing too takes place. Hitherto every civilisa- tion has died when its time came, though the exertions of wise, righteous, patriotic men may put off this inevitable end indefinitely. Struggle for ever for survivalship so as to prevent going back more or less to barbarism, to prevent deterioration of breed, and to keep mankind up to the mark, is the condition on which men and nations hold their lives on this earth, and no virtues will take the place of this energy to struggle. Conservatives and SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 279 Liberals (as distinguished from Radicals) are as a class, the most law abiding, honest, orderly, and well-behaved part of the population of old countries, but as Emerson says, though Conservatives love righteousness, they are apt to be too indolent to fight for it to the death with all their soul and with all their strength. So when a nation's time comes the opposite Jacobinic forces of un- righteousness, criminality, destruction, envy, hatred, and covetousness prevail, and another civilisation goes the way of past ones without end and number. Perhaps it would be impossible for human organs of speech to form a sentence more ludicrously false than the statement that ' force or war is no remedy.' The whole system of nature is and always 28o HORSES, SPORT AND WAR has been founded on the principle that force is the remedy for all weakness and imperfection in the world. If the law of the universe were not that strength should get the better of weakness, weakness would be everywhere and the world be hell ; for vice means weakness — or nega- tion of some strength, such for instance as strength to resist temptation. ' The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force.' If two contiguous races of men come in contact, one barbarous, that is, weak, unrighteous, and degraded, the other comparatively strong, righteous, and ener- getic, the law of God is that the latter should take the place of the former by force. Englishmen take the country of the native Australians by force, Americans SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 281 take the country of the Red Indians by force. In civilised countries well-behaved people take the place of the criminal classes by force. . In all these cases force is the effectual remedy for filthy, brutal, cruel, disorderly, lawless hopeless savagery. ' In the conflict of two races,' said the American O. W. Holmes at the time of the Indian Mutiny, 'our sympathies naturally go with the higher ; look at what is going on in India — a superior race against an inferior race — and where are English and American sympathies ? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful ques- tions ; all we know is that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the 282 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR same nature in the Inferior animals — tame it or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered. England takes down the Map of the World which she has girdled with empire, and says " Dele." The civiHsed world says, "Amen."' The radical-socialist who is on the side of barbarism against civilisation of course does not say ' Amen.' All these forms and degrees from anarchy and nihilism at the bottom up to radicalism (as distinguished from liberalism) that go by the generic name of ' socialism,' mean, as I need hardly say, war against civilisation. Struggle, struggle, struggle, in the battle of life for ever and ever and be honest and brave. Then indolence, stu- SPORT, WAR- AND MANLINESS 283 pidity, crime and vice will go to the wall, energy, intelligence, and noble lives will survive, and a race of men will not only be saved from deterioration, but will progress without known limit. Such are God's laws as observed by studying nature. Spin wool and cotton, provide for physical well-being, make money, drink tea, adulterate goods, close public houses and don't fight. Everybody who does all this will grow rich, will live comfortably, will never be hurt, and will die in his bed. Such are God's laws as taught by men whose qualities have come from nothing but long inherited industrialism. ' War,' said Lord Palmerston, ' is the natural state of man. Man is a fighting animal.' 284 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR In a famous Eastern legend, it Is written that ' when the mighty column of granite, from which once in a century an imponderable grain is detached by the passing of an angel's wing, is finally by that process, pulverised, then war will cease among the children of men, but not before.' Eastern races study and under- stand human nature. Western races study and understand steam-engines. What I say about war will seem very shocking to the half-crazy Utopian Socialist, who thinks that the human nature of the future is going to be a totally different thing from the human nature as it has been hitherto. He will perhaps call me an Atheist, as, in fact. The Pall Mall Gazette of July 26th 1887, actually did call Lord Salisbury for SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 285 saying in a speech about war, some- thing like what I have said. ' My op- ponent,' said a great grammarian, 'calls me a scoundrel, an infidel, and an Atheist, but the only reason he does so is that my opinion about the preterpluperfect tense differs from his.' Sometimes belief in universal peace comes from poetical imagination prepon- dering over wise insight into what human nature really is. We know that Tennyson, Mrs Browning, and many others have dreamed beautiful dreams about millen- niums, Utopias, universal peace and the world that ' would be when the war-drum throbbed no longer and the battle-flag was furled. In the parliament of men, the federation of the world,' or of ' one con- federate brotherhood planting one flag 286 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR only,' etc. etc. But what warrant does history or science give for such dreams ? Hope and dream as we may we have nothing to go by but history and science, that is, knowledge of facts. People with poetical imaginations must and should delight us with beautiful dreams, but for any practical politician to act upon them, in opposition to the teachings of history and science, means that he has mistaken his' vocation and that he should at once betake himself to imaginative literature before he has ruined the country he pretends to govern. The poets and imaginative writers sometimes talk terrible nonsense when they come to actual human life on this earth, witness Victor Hugo and Mr Morris the poet-upholsterer. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 287 All this talk about war leaves the ques- tion of the blessedness of peace just where it was. It is merely the old story. Two opposite laws of nature, both true, which man must obey, each in its place as best he can. The more truly he obeys them the better for him, the less truly the worse. All right conduct means right balance between opposite principles. Eating and drinking are good in their place, abstaining from food is good in its place. Woe betide the man who misses the balance. It is his business to hit it and he must suffer if he fails. Peace is good in its place. War is good in its place. Woe betide the nation that misses the balance. It is its business to hit it and it must suffer if it fails. Conservatism is necessary, and Reformi is 288 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR necessary. Woe betide the nation that fails in the balance. Pity to the miserable is good, and nonsurvival of the unfittest is good. Woe betide the people that fail to hit the balance. Christianity means war — war to the death against the evil that is in the world. The Christianity that is in a man means the noble or Christian passions that are in him, amongst others, the hunger and thirst after or passion for righteousness together with active and burning indigna- tion at all unrighteousness — zvar, in fact, on the side of right against wrong, of good against evil. The reason why the Christian nations prevail in war over the non-Christian nations is that Christianity is specially the religion of strength, duty and manliness. SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 289 Christianity means, as I have said, all the streno^ths that are in man. It is the religion that teaches men to rejoice with those that rejoice and weep with those that weep, to sympathise and to be heroic or actively unselfish. Few but Christians have strength for this in any considerable degree. It is the religion that teaches humility (freedom from pride, vanity, conceit, etc.) Few but Christians have strength for humility. It is the religion that says be temperate in all things. Few but Christians have strength for this. It is easy to exaggerate and go into extremes. Christianity is the religion that enjoins obedience to the will of God, or acting from duty, and because a thing is right. Few but Christians have strength for this. Christianity is the T 290 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR religion of faith, trust, hope and joy. Few but Christians have strength for these passions in a high, permanent and enduring degree in the face of the recurring disappointments and failures of life, and of the doubts inspired by the mysteries of the ' incomprehensible uni- verse.' Finally, Christianity is the religion that teaches us to ' endure hardness,' to ' be strong,' to be 'fervent in spirit,' and that says ' quit you like men' I conclude by repeating that inasmuch as manliness is a necessary quality in a nation, manly sports ought to be encouraged and cultivated. And besides this inasmuch as we are told 'that which thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,' it is plain that as sports should be cultivated they should SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 291 be carried out In the best possible manner. Thus It Is the duty of everyone to do what he can to Impart useful Ideas about sporting as about all other matters. These considerations will explain w^hy I have put together the papers already from time to time printed In newspapers and elsewhere, that form the first part of this publication. One final Illustration of the Importance of sport. German military critics about the British army are not as a rule over complimentary, but one of them wrote enthusiastically about the march of our cavalry to Cairo after the battle of Tel- el-keblr, which march saved that town from the fate of Alexandria. This Ger- man military critic said that such a march could only have been accomplished by 292 HORSES, SPORT AND WAR English horses mounted by English men and officered by English sportsmen. Sport cultivates manliness, and is one of the antidotes to the effeminacy that ruins nations. There is a story of the Rev. Jack Russel, in his old age, riding seventy miles to cover, enjoying a good day's hunting, and then riding seventy miles home again. The celebrated Tom Smith, during many years, averaged nearly eighty falls a year hunting. These men carried out the Scriptural injunction and ' endured hardness.' Now if France a hundred years ago had possessed more of this strong spirit instead of the softness, effeminacy, and thence weakness and vice that reigned so generally, France, per- haps, would not have succumbed as she did to that successful rising of the criminal SPORT, WAR AND MANLINESS 293 classes, and of the predatory and homi- cidal savagery (that exists in all countries) headed by Robespierre and his fellow devils, which goes by the name of the French Revolution. THE END HOLLAND BROS. BOOKSELLERS BIRMINGHAM