_Mr. Forester._ I am no revolutionist. I am no advocate for violent and arbitrary changes in the state of society. I care not in what proportions property is divided (though I think there are certain limits which it ought never to pass, and approve the wisdom of the American laws in restricting the fortune of a private citizen to twenty thousand a year), provided the rich can be made to know that they are but the stewards of the poor, that they are not to be the monopolisers of solitary spoil, but the distributors of general possession; that they are responsible for that distribution to every principle of general justice, to every tie of moral obligation, to every feeling of human sympathy; that they are bound to cultivate simple habits in themselves, and to encourage most such arts of industry and peace as are most compatible with the health and liberty of others. _Mr. Fax._ On this principle, then, any species of luxury in the artificial adornment of persons and dwellings, which condemns the artificer to a life of pain and sickness in the alternations of the furnace and the cellar, is more baleful and more criminal than even that which, consuming in idle prodigality the fruits of the earth, destroys altogether, in the proportion of its waste, so much of the possibility of human existence: since it is better not to be than to be in misery. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ That is some consolation for me, as it shows me that there are others worse than myself; for I really thought you were going between you to prove me one of the greatest rogues in England. But seriously, Forester, you think the keeping of pleasure-horses, for the reasons you have given, a selfish and criminal species of luxury? _Mr. Forester._ I am so far persuaded of it, that I keep none myself. _Sir Telegraph Paxarett._ But are not these four very beautiful creatures? Would you wish not to see them in existence, living as they do a very happy and easy kind of life? _Mr. Forester._ That I am disposed to question, when I compare the wild horse, in his native deserts, in the full enjoyment of health and liberty, and all the energies of his nature, with those docked, cropped, curtailed, mutilated animals, pent more than half their lives in the close confinement of a stable, never let out but to run in trammels, subject, like their tyrant man, to an infinite variety of diseases, the produce of civilisation and unnatural life, and tortured every now and then by some villain of a farrier, who has no more feeling for them than a West Indian planter has for his slaves; and when you consider, too, the fate of the most cherished of the species, racers and hunters, instruments and often victims of sports equally foolish and cruel, you will acknowledge that the life of the civilised horse is not an enviable destiny.