Isaac came out as a five-year old in 1836, and ran till 1842, starting eighty-eight times; that Sir W. M. Stanley's Zohrab came out at three years old in 1833, and ran till 1841, starting eighty-six times; that Barney Bodkin ran once as a two-year old in 1832, and continued running till 1839, starting sixty-six times; that Lord Exeter's Bodice came out at three years old in 1834, and ran till October, 1839, starting sixty-three times; that Mr. Ferguson's Harkaway came out as a three-year old in 1837, and ran till the end of 1841, starting thirty-nine times; that Major Yarburgh's Charles the Twelfth first appeared as a three-year old in 1839, and ran till 1842, starting thirty times; that Lanercost first appeared as a three-year old in 1838, and ran till 1842, starting forty times. The list might be indefinitely extended. We have selected at hazard a few horses famous for stoutness, between the years 1830 and 1840. But although the number of stout four, five, and six-year olds decreases rapidly in the racing calendars between 1850 and 1866, there is one uniform feature noticeable throughout the series. It applies to Rataplan, Fisherman, and Moulsey, the three horses which have started most frequently within the last dozen years, and is, indeed, of universal applicability. Not one horse in a thousand that runs eight or more races as a two-year old will be in training at four years old, or, if in training, will be able to stay as a four-year old over a cup course.

Few are the students of racing-calendar literature who are aware how many of our historical racehorses, such as Bay Middleton, Amato, Glencoe, Plenipotentiary, Mundig, Mameluke, Bloomsbury, The Baron, Pyrrhus the First, Sir Tatton Sykes, Blair Athol, and countless others, made their début in public after they had attained three years of age. To these names might be added a long list of famous horses, such as Touchstone, the Queen of Trumps, Voltigeur, Cossack, Wild Dayrell, and others, that ran but once as two-year olds. The career of Crucifix, whose first appearance was for the July Stakes in 1839, and her last for the Oaks, at Epsom, in 1840, and who started twelve times in eleyen months without ever being beaten, is always sorrowfully pointed at by opponents of two-year old racing. "Surely," says Mr. George Tattersall, "that system of turf management and training cannot be good which forces a superior animal so much beyond her strength and sends her a cripple to the stud at three years old, sacrificed before she has reached the zenith of her age, by premature abuse of her great powers." What are we to say about the modern Crucifix, Achievement, who ran eleven times at two years old, and has to thank the exhaustion consequent upon powers overstrained at this early age for her defeat last year in the rich Middle Park Stakes, at Newmarket, and this year in the Oaks, at Epsom ?

It

may well be doubted whether our English racecourse will ever again see such mares as Beeswing and Alice Hawthorn, such horses as Lanercost or Harkaway. There is not a six-year old now in

training in England to whom any of these four could not at the same age have given a stone and a beating over the Beacon Course. But we have said enough to satisfy even the most thoughtless that the English racehorse of to-day cannot stay and stand training like the horses of the past. The last Derby winner that was in training at five years old was Teddington, and he won the Derby in 1851. Is it not high time for the Jockey Club to take these patent facts into consideration, and to debate whether the mischief is irremediable? We have not space here to offer suggestions or discuss remedies. Enough if we can get these facts generally recognised; for, in that case, profitable as it may be for gamblers to ruin colts and fillies by setting them to compete for a dozen or more two-year old races, we are not without hopes that, when some of the "heavy plungers" of the hour shall have passed away, a remedy will be found.

II. It is not our intention to touch otherwise than lightly and briefly upon the other and more formidable danger which bodes little good to the longevity of the turf,-that is to say, the serious deterioration in morale of the owners of racehorses. No one will suspect us of including in this sweeping censure all owners of racing studs. Happily for England, there are still upon the turf men,-not alone noblemen, baronets, and squires, but also some professional betting-men,—in regard to whom, as in regard to the late Lord Exeter, it is felt by the public that any horse that carries their colours upon a racecourse will run no less truly upon its merits than the needle points to the pole. Of them, as of the greatest jockey that England ever produced, it might be said that "it would be as easy to turn the sun from his course as Frank Buckle from the path of honour and duty." Far be it from us to mention their honourable names, or to reveal how short the list is. We have already offered to sporting writers our advice to confine their comments upon any turf malpractices which they may notice to the columns of the daily or weekly press. Essays upon turf morality, whether imbedded in the pages of a magazine or published independently, have never yet done any good. He who undertakes to write them should himself be "as holy as severe;" and cannot but be aware that incedit per ignes suppositos cineri doloso. The ground upon which a turf censor treads is too delicate to be lightly trodden. Nevertheless we are not without hope that some of the younger patrons of the turf will look around them, and ask themselves whether the atmosphere which they now breathe upon a racecourse is the same that Lord Glasgow, Lord Zetland, and General Peel, the late Dukes of Richmond and Bedford, the late Lord Eglinton, and Admiral Harcourt, exhaled and respired five-and-twenty years ago. Is an atmosphere of elevation and purity compatible with a system of betting which lowers the dignity of those who pursue it into the dirt, and makes their transactions, their gains and losses, their pecuniary engagements, and all that honourable men love to regard as sacred,

the theme of every idle and malicious tongue? "There are men of education and high birth who are as much in the power of the betting fraternity and of the money-lender, as the unfortunate debtor was in the power of his aristocratic creditor at Rome." These are grave words. Would that we could indignantly deny their truth! The same contemporary writer proceeds to say, "A robbery on the turf is a very bad thing when it is designed by one man; but to find that it may be whispered in the ear of an English nobleman or gentleman, without repulsion and disgust, not unfrequently with partisanship and co-operation, is much worse." It has often been remarked that no

nation, or no section of a nation, is ever cognisant of a decline in its own morality. The Romans under Julius Didianus thought themselves, says Gibbon, the equals of the Romans under Augustus. We are sometimes told that if horses are "pulled" now with the cognisance of men of birth and high position, there were Lord Darlingtons and others half a century ago who stuck at nothing,-that if racing accounts are badly settled now, it took a noble lord in the palmy days of 182- many months to pay up the huge sum of money which he lost on the Doncaster St. Leger. It is hardly necossary for us to answer that the men of rank and fortune who stooped to malpractices of yore, were as much an exception to the mass of their order as are the honest owners of horses the exception upon a racecourse of to-day,—that the delayed settlement in 182—, to which we have alluded, was the solitary default in a prolonged turf career. But there are other evidences of the diminished self-respect of many noble and gentle patrons of the turf, which cannot be noticed without regret and humiliation by thoughtful and reflective moralists. The racehorse, it would seem, is a more democratic leveller than Mr. Beales or Mr. Odgers; a greater disintegrator of aristocratic society than the railroad, or the penny press, or the Reform Bill itself, big with mysterious and inscrutable possibilities. That a young, raw, uneducated Yorkshire or Newmarket lad, who can ride seven stone, but who cannot pen a letter of which a milkmaid would not be ashamed, should be welcomed to the homes of dukes and marquises,-that he should be encouraged to smoke cigars, play billiards, and volunteer opinions without restraint in the presence of his betters of either sex,-is one of the saddest anomalies of our modern civilisation. The days are at hand when the people of England will pay little respect to men and women with handles to their names who do not respect themselves. Fashion, said Henry Fielding more than a century ago, can alone make and keep gambling sweet and wholesome. When it shall cease to be fashionable for men born in the purple to chat and smoke with jockeys and trainers, and to bet thousands and tens of thousands upon the speed and bottom of a racehorse, without any other means of paying, if the race goes against them, than the indulgence a money-lender shall afford, then, and not till then, shall we expect to see the rehabilitation of the turf.

ON SOVEREIGNTY.

WE are told in Scripture that the people of God desired for themselves a king, and that they were grievously afflicted by a succession of kings who were, for the most part, bad,-given to cruelty and blood, tyrants who coveted and too often took to themselves the wives and wealth of their subjects,—and that thus the people of the Lord were punished for their desire to abandon the labours, the dangers, and the responsibilities of democratic action. For it seems to be thus and thus only that we can read the lesson taught us in the early history of the children of Abraham.

But the longing of the Israelites for a king seems to have been natural enough. If we may judge of them as we would of other nations, not knowing or at all understanding how far the direct dealings of the Lord with this people should have made them specially capable of the responsibility of independence,-we may well imagine that the security to be derived from a supreme authority should have been felt by them to be beneficial. Little, we may suppose, was then said or thought among men of the glories of democratic rule. But property already had its charms, and the value of safety was appreciated. From those days to these in which we are now living some kind of sovereignty has been found to be indispensable by all nations. The necessity of placing in some specially selected hands the powers of executing the laws, has been acknowledged to be a necessity in all ages and in all countries. Whether the power of making the laws shall be placed in the same hands or in others, or whether the simple will of the owner of those hands shall in itself be law, has been a matter of contro

versy among nations. That controversy, carried on through ages, has become a science, to which we give the familiar name of politics, and from it there have sprung the three leading forms of sovereignty which are at present in use among the nations of the earth. That in cach of these there are diverse branches,-branches so diverse as to make the one but little like the other,—is true;-but we may probably take with safety this division as sufficient, and declare that in treating of sovereignty we may class all sovereigns under one of these heads. There is firstly the autocratic sovereign, whom we may perhaps call an Emperor, as the name of despot is unsavoury. With him the full sovereignty is supposed to rest in his own hands.

There is, secondly, the elected temporary sovereign of a so-called republic,-whom we may style President,-in whose hands also, for

the period of his rule, much of the political sovereignty of the nation is vested, if indeed all of it be not entrusted to him.

And there is, thirdly, the constitutional sovereign, whom we still delight to honour by the name of Monarch, and whom, that we may be easily understood, we will call simply a King. In his hands,such at least is the intention of his subjects,-is placed no political power; but to him is confided the duty of choosing those who shall exercise political power,-with more or less of control exercised over him in the making of such choice. As, however, it has come to be perceived, that the choice of a political minister is in itself the very source and fountain of political power, control over that choice has become a necessary part of the third mode of sovereignty.

In discussing the various merits of these three forms of government we may perhaps fairly take France, and the United States, and England as our examples. It has been already admitted that in each form there are branches so diverse, that two of the same shall, perhaps, hardly be recognised by any lines of family likeness. The rule of the French Emperor and that of the Sultan are by no means the same in their nature. The Republics of the United States and of Mexico, are not in similar conditions. And the Crowns of England and of Prussia affect the people in very different degrees. But in each case the example selected may be taken, probably, more justly than any other, as showing the condition to which that special mode of sovereignty will, if successfully conducted, lead a great nation.

And here it may be well to observe that it is, and of necessity must be, the natural desire of all peoples to preserve and to honour, and to pay all legal obedience to the sovereigns of their choice. This assertion may at the first hearing seem to many to be incompatible with the disobedience and the rebellion which is always prevailing in some quarter of the civilised world. But rebellion is wrought either by the unjust or by the injured. If by the unjust,-then it is wrought in opposition to the people and not in their behalf, and is no sign of animosity from a people towards its sovereign. Such rebellions have rarely prevailed. If by the injured, then we may say that the sovereign under whom injustice is done is no longer sovereign by the choice of his people. But as all sovereignties have been established simply for the weal of the nation, that life and property may be safe, that good laws may exist and have force, that the evils of anarchy may be avoided,-in short, that life may be a blessing and not a curse, -the source from whence that blessing is to come cannot but be dear to mankind. In fact, men have ever delighted to honour their sovereigns, expecting much, hoping much, bearing much, forgiving much. The wonder has been that they have so often continued to honour men who have been unworthy of any honour, and to obey men who have been unfit to receive obedience.

But mankind, when supporting the throne which they have esta