Leaning from the stand or from the carriage are men and women so absorbed in the struggle of bone and muscle and mettle that they make a grand harvest for the pickpockets, who carry off the pocket-books and portemonnaies.  Men looking on see only two horses with two riders flying around the ring; but there is many a man on that stand whose honor and domestic happiness and fortune—­white mane, white foot, white flank—­are in the ring, racing with inebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and with ruin—­black neck, black foot, black flank.  Neck and neck they go in that moral Epsom.

Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with horse-racing dissipations this summer.  Long ago the English government got through looking to the turf for the dragoon and light-cavalry horse.  They found the turf depreciates the stock, and it is yet worse for men.  Thomas Hughes, the member of parliament and the author, known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started in this country, wrote a letter, in which he said:  “Heaven help you, then; for of all the cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality holding its head high, to this belauded institution of the British turf.”  Another famous sportsman writes:  “How many fine domains have been shared among these hosts of rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years; and unless the system be altered, how many more are doomed to fall into the same gulf!” The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of L70,000, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it.  With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse-racing of England and America.

III.  I go further, and speak of another temptation that hovers over the watering-places; and this is the temptation to sacrifice physical strength.  The modern Bethesda was intended to recuperate the physical health; and yet how many come from the watering-places, their health absolutely destroyed!  New York and Brooklyn idiots boasting of having imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before breakfast.  Families accustomed to going to bed at ten o’clock at night gossiping until one or two o’clock in the morning.  Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams, and lemons, and lobster-salads, and cocoa-nuts, until the gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentation and protest.  Delicate women and brainless young men chassezing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy.  Thousands of men and women coming back from our watering-places in the autumn with the foundations laid for ailments that will last them all their life long.  You know as well as I do that this is the simple truth.