We shall value manliness more than scholarship, ease or wealth, or
even the freedom we fought so hard to save. Food has no flavour
until we have been hungry, rest has no value unless we have been
weary, life has no zest save that from fierce endeavour, it is the
work we do which builds our strength. The manhood of our fathers
came by use of arms, and of horses, by going down to the sea in
ships, by hard, rough living, taking risks and enduring pain, by
generous giving and honest loving.
The manhood of our sons will not be made by indoor life, by ease, by
softness, by selfishness or vice. The body as well as the mind and
the spirit must have daily training, renewal and growth, if we would
avert disease, corruption and decay. The future has nothing to add
to the past save in the hazards of the air, the fierce delight of
handling aircraft, and the hardening of all our fibres in the
conquest of the skies. It will be long, however, before the
aeroplane can alight in forests, on mountains, rough ground or stormy
water, or venture very far from the bases of supply. Till then our
industry and our wars will still need horses, and {245} even
afterwards we shall hardly be able to spare them from our pleasures.
In the past, the horses carried our ancestors out of savagery through
barbarism into civilization. They saved us from the barren labour of
Chinese, Egyptian and Indian cultivators, and gave us the large
opportunities of our country life. Horses and shipping added all the
continents to our estate, the conquest of the world to our arms, the
glamour of adventure to our history. If only we can learn to
understand horses with a quicker sympathy, a bolder reasoning, the
training which our fathers had as horsemen, will be bettered in the
training of our sons.
{246}
INDEX.
Acacia, 57.
Action [of Light, theory of, Chap. II. and p. 160.
Afghans, 223.
Africa, 29, 31, 56, 177, 230.
Agriculture, horses in, 145.
Alaska, 21.
Alberta, 230.
Alcohol, 197.
Alexander the Great, 138, 201.
Alkali, 59.
America:
Central, 16;
North, Chps. I. and II., horsemen of, 148;
South, 20.
Ancestors of horse, 2.
Apples, 200.
Argentine, 152, 177, 223; Remounts, 232.
Arabia, 28, 70, 139, 209.
Armenia, 137-8.
Armies, 224.
Armour, 145.
Arms, 174.
Ass, 9, 29, 30, 35, 130, 208.
Assyria, 14, 136, 138.
Atlantic, 2; Continent, 5.
Australia, 152, 155, 169, 177, 203, 230.
Babylonia, 135.
Backfalls, 79.
Baffin's Bay, 19.
Balance in riding, 221.
Baltic, 19, 42, 43, 111.
Barb, 28, 131, 209.
Bathing, 6.
Bay, 14, 31, 32, 46, 117-8, 129 _et seq._
Bearded horses, 23, 36.
Bells, 197.
Bent leg riding, 143, 207.
Bering Land, 21, 24.
Bering Sea, 16, 21, 24.
Biblical record, 129.
Billets for horses, 233.
Birch, Major, "Modern Riding," 226
Biting, 74.
Bitt, 109, 119, 156.
Bivouac, 241.
Blackfeet, 107, 116.
Blanket, 153, 198.
Black horses, 47.
Blisters, 153, 198.
Bolas, 176.
Bolting. 75.
Bone, 39.
Boers, 29, 179, 223.
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