I never knew a man yet who could give himself to the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time, and not be battered in morals. They hook up their spanking team, and put on their sporting-cap, and light their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down the road to perdition. The great day at Saratoga, and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the other watering-places, is the day of the races. The hotels are thronged, nearly every kind of equipage is taken up at an almost fabulous price, and there are many respectable people mingling with jockeys, and gamblers, and libertines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy women. The bar-tender stirs up the brandy-smash. The bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their money soon enough to lose it. Three weeks before the race takes place the struggle is decided, and the men in the secret know on which steed to bet their money. The two men on the horses riding around long before arranged who shall beat. 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 £70,000, 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.