“If the shattered world falls, the wreck may crush him, but still undismayed.” “The gentlest are always the bravest; the bravest are always the best.” Chapter XVI. The Gist of it all. And now we draw to the close this thesis on the racehorse in Australia. We have been, after all, but wandering upon the outskirts of a very vast subject, and were we proposing to indite a work for the use of experts—breeders, owners, trainers, even, let us add, punters—our thesis would swell into a large volume, our large volume into an encyclopaedia, and our encyclopaedia into a library. And the gist of it all? Is the entire business, with all its branches and ramifications, with all the employment offered by it to thousands of people, with all the land now in use for breeding, with all those beautiful parks reserved for racing purposes, in and near the great cities, is it all designed simply to furnish an Australian holiday? I do assure you that there is involved something a very great deal deeper than that. It is the horse, the whole future and welfare of the horse, that is the great stake for which we are playing, most of us unconsciously. The day of the noble animal is not over, and its future spells infinitely more than the mere fact of whether he can run a mile in a minute and 36 seconds, or whether he can cover three miles in 5.23. During the Boer War, such a short time since, but which seems to our children, perhaps, to have been waged centuries ago, we expended an enormous amount of horse life in a country where soldiers had perforce to be carried on horseback, and where all the supplies for an army were dragged upon wheels, and when motor power had not yet come into its own. And in the last great death grapple, with all the petrol which was exploded, with all the motor traction used, with all the amount of transport, and of scouting by air, we still required a larger horse supply than ever before. We cannot see so clearly into the future as did the poet Tennyson, when he wrote Locksley Hall. That wonderful seer, you may remember, wrote his poem in the early ’forties of the last century, and he predicted, as plainly as words could tell, the advent of the flying machine, for use both in commerce and in war, and “all the wonders that would be.” It is not given to many to possess the true prophetic vision, but it is a simple task to foretell that war has not yet ceased upon the earth, and that we have not even begun to make reaping hooks of our spears, or spades and ploughs and harrows of our guns. It is the improvement of our horse, for general utility purposes, and for war, that is really the motive which ought to promote this racing of ours, but which poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a fatuous moment, has lately dubbed “the curse of the country.”