ARABS versus ENGLISH HORSES.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 6, Issue 348, 3 January 1863, Page 5

ARABS versus ENGLISH HORSES.

The Argus of December 9 thus replies to the letter of Mr. H. N. Simson, which appeared in our last : — Mr. Hector Norman Simson, in defence of the English horse against the Arab, is a champion of commendable intrepidity. He is restrained by no scruples of delicacy in proclaiming his own exclusive knowledge of all that pertains to horse flesh. There is but one prophet, and his name is not Mahommed, but Simson. In the presence of the seer of Bournfield, Mahommed is but "a smart man," and Abd-el-Kader a " half savage." No one knows anything about horses but Mr. Simson. The English "horsey" man does not more completely dwarf the Arab chiefs by comparison, than does the English horse transcend the steeds of the desert. The controversy wliioli for- tnree hundred years has agitated the Western World, is henceforth at an end. Mr. Simson has spoken, and before the famous owner of Warhawk, the Arab retires into his native insignificance. The traditions of a thousand years are made an idle fable. History, poetry, and the Turf Calendar are all equally proved to be impostures. The superiority of the Arab horse must henceforth be held to be a romantic delusion — a story out of the Arabian, Nights. The myth has been resolved into thin air by Mr. Hector Norman Simson, who, from the height of his superior civilisation, is able to reduce both Arab men and horses to their true proportions. At the risk of incurring the charge of heresy, we venture to dissent from the new faith, whose Mecca is Bournfield. Without presuming to dispute Mr. Simson's authority as a rearer of horsestock, we must pronounce him to be singularly unqualified to judge of the merits of the Arab horse for the purposes of the Victorian stud. Mr. Simson may know a good deal about horse-racing and race horses, but of the Arab horse he is utterly and hopelessly ignorant. We doubt if ever he has seen an Arab in his life, and we believe he would not know one if he saw him. His view of the matter is peculiarly a " horsey " view, which we must beg ' to say is the worst, the most prejudiced, and the least intelligent view which can be taken. He can only regard the Arab horse in competition with his English descendant as to their relative capacities for flying over a couple of miles of soft turf at three years old. He decides that the blood which a thousand years have matured and refined, is no fit match for that of England ; and he would pass a law making it a felony to ally a thoroughbred mare to an Arab horse ! Against this most absolute authority, it is perhaps enough to set the concurrent testimony of all experienced witnesses, who have known, as Mr. Simson does not, both the Arab horse and the English. Assuming the subject under discussion to be, whether the Arab is or is not the best horse to furnish the future horse-breed of ..Victoria, we deny that Mr. Simson has brought forward any arguments in favour of his view of the cabe. In the first place, we must remember that the controversy is not between the racing powers of the Arab and the English horses. The object of the Victorian horse-breeder is not exclusively, or even mainly, to produce race-horses. A breed of good hacks and good carriage-horses is infinitely more valuable to the country ; and at present it may be said that such a breed does not exist in this colony. We have produced many very excellent imitations of the "flying cripple :> — thanks to the enterprise of two or three gentlemen — but no one can deny that we are singularly deficient in a breed of horses fit for general purposes. It is mainly to cure this defect that we have recommended the introduction of Ai-ab sires. In doing so, we propose merely to repeat here the very process by which the English horse himself has arrived at his comparative excellence. On the basis of the English horse, we would take advantage of our peculiarities of soil and climate to carry the experiment still further, and to produce a race of horses which shall unite the good qualities of the Arab sire and the English dam, in a country which maybe said to be intermediate between England and. Arabia. .The English horse we may admit to have almost reached perfection in England itself ; but it is impossible to believe that this perfection can be maintained in Victoria— or, rather, it is absurd to take the English for our only type of horse. The English blood-horse is the result of years of careful breeding and selection, in a climate whose influences are precisely the opposite of those of Arabia. He is the product of climate as well as of breeding ; and it is unreasonable to expect that he can be maintained, without change, in a country like Victoria. The higher average temperature, the dryness of the soil, and the purity of the air, must infallibly produce their influence upon the English horse in this country, although the change may be the work of many generations. The Australian horse, the progeny of English blood-stock, if kept free from crosses with imported sires, must infallibly assume a type of character differing from that of the parent race, and assimilating to that of the high-caste Arabs. It is on this ground, therefore, that we advocate the introduction of the Arab strain' to produce the best Australian horse out of the best English stock, for all purposes. The arguments of Mr. Simson do not touch this view of the case, and they are founded upon gross ignorance of the character and history of the Arab horse. As an instance of the boldness with which he lays down his arrogant dogmas, we may quote his statement that the aristocracy of England, and the potentates of Europe, being the richest and the most intellectual of men, the best judges of horses in the world, and the best able to gratify all their tastes, without regard to expense, invariably prefer the English to the Arah horse for all purposes. "Is it in reason," he asks, " that, with their power and wealth, they would not find the ways and means to supply themselves from Arabia, or wherever they are to be found, if. the Arab was a superior horse ?" The, simple answer to this rather foolish argument i&lpia^as far as is practicable,, and fpig^U the KghemUrposes, the great and the wejjffi^^ffav of E!sjrapdo use:the Arab horse in spj|fe£af.sis" aUege'appects. The potenta tea of E ufdpej'says;

Mr. Simson, get their chargers from England; but if he carried his researches a little deeper into his subject he would perceive how unfortunate is this assertion. He will learn that, if there is any purpose for which the Arab is preferred by the potentates of Europe, and any quality ia which he is indisputably pre-eminent, it is that of a charger in battle. The conqueror of Austerlitz rode an Arab in all his great battles. The favorite horse of the " Duke " was an Arab (Copenhagen.) The majority of English generals, down to our own times, have preferred Arabs to English horses, having a choice of either — as Lord Raglan in the Crimea, LordG-oughatGoojerat, Sir Charles Napier at Meeanee, Lord Clyde in Oude. Ab the best proof, however, that the " potentates of Europe " are not insensible to the value of the Arab horse, we may adduce the well-known fact that in every Royal stud in Europe the Arabs "form a large proportion of the sires, and especially at Pin and Pompadour, the recent establishments of the Emperor Napoleon. As for the aristocracy of England, if they kavp. not usp.d the ArabbloodtO produce good hunters, it is certainly not from any evidence of the Arab's unfitness to breed •weight-carriers across country. Fifty years ago, the best authority on the subject (" Nimrod ") •writes that the best hunter in Mr. Meynell's country was a half-bred horse got by Lord Olive's Arabian. As a breeder of hunters, indeed, the Arab perhaps is even more valuable than in any other capacity. His fineness of constitution — his compactness of muscle, and strength and solidity •of bone — his intelligence and docility, are admirably fitted to give the English horse precisely the qualities in which it is most deficient ; and if the experiment of the cross has not been tried more frequently in England, we must attribute it, first, to the difficulty of procuring real good Arabs in England, and next, to the stupid prejudices of English stud-grooms against the comparative small size of the Eastern horse. The opinion of General Jacob on this matter we must beg leave to-set above that of Mr. Norman, Simson. The one had seen horses of every race and at every kind of work — the other perhaps knows nothing beyond horse-racing, and -could not tell a Seglavee from a dromedary. ' The Arab horse,' says the best cavalry leader of our time, is unapproachable in excellence, for military and general purposes, by any other breed on earth. But we venture, even on Mr. Simson's - own ground, namely, for pure speed and endur- : ance, to claim at least an equality for the Arab '••with the best English horses. We contend, at least, that the question of speed has- never been fairly tested. The few received stories of trials between second-rate English racers and Arabs rest on dubious evidence, at least in this respect — 1-that they do not tell us what were the Arabs <■ Which competed with the English horses at these trials. That even a very ordinary English horse ■ will beat the common Eastern horse, under almost any conditions, is of course undeniable ; ■ but there never has been a satisfactory trial between a pure high-caste Arab and an English " horse, under such circumstances as to establish * the superiority of the latter. . That an English i horse will gallop faster than any Arab, at an • earlier age, for two or three miles, over a care- . fully-levelled racecourse, is not to be disputed. -But this is no proof of the superiority of the -English horse. He is trained with the sole view ■of making him fast at a short distance. He is •a sort of artificial creation, designed chiefly for the benefit of ' horsey ' men, and as a medium of betting. And how many of those who are bred, especially for this purpose, ever attain a tolerable amount of success ? Of the fifteen hundred blood horses said to be born every year in England, what proportion are good to run as three-jear-olds for any distance 1 Not fifty are ever heard of in turf annals, and of these fifty how many are worth the expense of their breeding and training when arrived at years of maturity ? There arises, now and then, it is true, a Eataplan, .an Alice Hawthorn, or a Fisherman ; but how much horseflesh is wasted yearly in the endeavour to produce a few flyers at Newmarket and at Goodwood ? In the only country where the two breeds are systematically opposed to each other, that is in India, the superiority of the English horse has not always been evident over the Arabs which are imported into that country. In 1847, and for three years after, a grey horse called Elepoo was the acknowledged master of the Calcutta turf, beating at even weights, English and Australian horses of English blood, at all distances. We have no means of referring to any record of his performances, but the time we believe to have been as good, if not better, than any reached on the Melbourne racecourse. But it is surely superfluous in us to dilate on the merits of the Arab horse, as a breeder of racing-stock, when the very excellence of the English horse, it is admitted on all hands, is due to the introduction of the Arab blood. All we ask is, that the experiment, so successful in England, should be repeated here, under more favourable conditions. In his tirade against the Arab, Mr. Simson, curiously enough, only reproduces the precise complaint which was made in England when the first Arab stallion was imported by James the First. It was then loudly asserted by the best authorities of the day that the introduction of the Arab horse would lead to the degeneration of the old English stock. Yet the first generation gave us Flying Childers, and . a few years more, the famous Matchem, whose blood is the fountain-head of our proudest equine pedigree. It is impossible that there could be more decisive and complete evidence of the advantages of crossing the English with the Arab horse ; and if the practice has not been kept up in modern days, we must ascribe it not to any | degeneracy of the Arabs themselves, but to the simple fact that horseraoing in England has become something different from what it used to be — that it is no longer carried on with the patriotic object of improving the. breed of horses, but simply for the sake of a gambling excitement and for that sort of sport which is cultivated by "sporting" men, rather than sportsmen.