Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/486

 470 which entails such misery and destruction of life can not be too strongly commented upon." If we take the age of three years as that at which horses begin to work, and twelve as that at which they are worn out, it follows that the period of their efficiency is shorter by at least fourteen years than it should be. In other words, the nation has to buy three horses when it ought to buy only one, and thus upward of 200,000,000 are spent every twenty-one years in the purchase of horses when 68,000,000 ought to suffice. The loss, therefore, to the nation is at least 135,000,000 in twenty-one years.

If this were all, the question would surely be most serious; but it is not all. Unless the facts thus far stated can be set aside, our horses work on the average seven or eight years; but how do they work? The collective experience of the country will answer that the work is done at the cost of frequent interruptions, and with an amount of discomfort and pain which often becomes agony. It is easy to say that much of the evil must be laid to the charge of grooms and stable-men; and perhaps the censures dealt out to these men are not undeserved. They are, at least, outspoken. In the last century Lord Pembroke spoke of grooms as being "generally the worst informed of all persons living." "No other servant," says Mr. Mayhew, "possesses such power, and no domestic more abuses his position. It is impossible to amend the regulation of any modern stable without removing some of this calling, or overthrowing some of the abuses with a perpetuation of which the stable servant is directly involved." In this state of things the most humane of masters becomes, he adds, an unconscious tyrant to the brute which serves him so well. It is a miserable fact that grooms on their own responsibility are in the habit of administering secretly to horses medicines the cost of which they pay themselves. It may fairly be said that in every case the remedy is ill-judged, and creates worse mischief than that which it is designed to remove. Among these medicines, arsenic, antimony, and niter seem to be the favorites; but the list of remedies is not ended with these. The experience of ages, if it has failed to do more, has impressed on them the fact that the chief source of the sufferings of horses is to be found in the foot. The suspicion that the foot is not treated rightly by the traditionary method never enters their minds; and they deal with the limb not from a knowledge of its anatomy, structure, and purpose, but in accordance with the popular notions, which are, in plain speech, outrageously absurd. In profound ignorance that the hoof is porous, they apply hoof-ointments, which answer to cement plastered on a wall. If these were in constant use, Mr. Douglas asserts emphatically that not a morsel of sound horn would remain at the end of six months on the horses, and shoeing would become an impossibility. If the groom be told that he is thus preventing the internal moisture from reaching the outer surface and the air from circulating inward, his only answer is an incredulous laugh. His conviction is that the hoof should not come