point with him.  I should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the finish.  I love my country, and I love horses.  Stubbs’s old mezzotint of Eclipse hangs over my desk, and Herring’s portrait of Plenipotentiary,—­whom I saw run at Epsom,—­over my fireplace.  Did I not elope from school to see Revenge, and Prospect, and Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-course where now yon suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen hundred and ever-so-few?  Though I never owned a horse, have I not been the proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest little “Morgin” that ever stepped?  Listen, then, to an opinion I have often expressed long before this venture of ours in England.  Horse-racing is not a republican institution; horse-trotting is.  Only very rich persons can keep race-horses, and everybody knows they are kept mainly as gambling implements.  All that matter about blood and speed we won’t discuss; we understand all that; useful, very,—­of course,—­great obligations to the Godolphin “Arabian,” and the rest.  I say racing horses are essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables.  Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican.  It belongs to two phases of society,—­a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements.  Real republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it.  This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively quiet.  But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling; and with all its immense attractions to the sense and the feelings,—­to which I plead very susceptible,—­the disguise is too thin that covers it, and everybody knows what it means.  Its supporters are the Southern gentry,—­fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans exactly, as we understand the term,—­a few Northern millionnaires more or less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real people, and the mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst very bad neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.  In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all classes, from the Queen to the costermonger.  London is like a shelled corn-cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his office-stool the next day without wincing.

Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment.  The racer is incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon, as much as the thimble-rigger’s “little joker.”  The trotter is essentially and daily useful, and only incidentally a tool for sporting men.