“A great English commoner, whose ire had been aroused on one occasion by a member of the House of Lords, in reply, in a speech of burning oratory, spoke of the aforesaid gentleman as being in his titled position merely by reason of the fact that he was ‘the accident of an accident.’ There is no doubt that Hambletonian 10, the present head of the trotting family, was even more of an accident than the English lord was. Bellfounder mares of trotting propensities were rarer than imported Messengers, and if the mating of Abdallah with this mare was not an accident, but the plan of a thoughtful intellect looking to the future, the descendants of the man who thought it out should have risen up and told it last month, that their forefathers might have been honored along with Columbus at the opening of the World’s Fair. Now the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ is quite an accident himself. He is here by reason of the fact that many trotting breeders in their wild vagaries and theories regarding the best way to breed a trotter, ranging all the way, in the theory of breeding, from thoroughblood to jackass, have accidentally honored a few thousand pacing mares with a service to some of their Hambletonians. As a result the ‘trotting-bred’ pacer is with us. As it is quite impossible for the trotting turf to get rid of this rascal if they wished to, and as he has managed to be quite a game and fast money-making machine himself, he has clinched the popularity of the pacer as a pacer and has stuck a peg in the map of popular favor that would be hard to be removed. “And it is safe to say that by reason of the blood of Pilot, Jr., Clay, Blue Bull, Tom Hal, Pocahontas and many others being so generally distributed in the pedigrees of trotters, the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ will continue to come from such trotting sources in the future in geometrical proportion and to pace in the same ratio. What will be done with them? Each one, with speed, is simply a money-making machine, and his owner will not be long in putting him at the work which nature cut out for him. To destroy him merely because he paces belongs to the dark ages when the pacing gait was one which made no money, but now, since the pacing purses have gotten to be so liberal and getting more so each year, it is only common sense to suppose that owners of pacing horses will begin to take more pains in their development and their breeding. This will improve their speed. As it is now, we do not suppose there is a betting horseman alive who would not give large odds that the pacer will be the first two-minute horse.