OPPOSING FORCES.
Having taken upon ourselves to reform evils, rooted deep in old customs, and to abolish abuses older than our civilization, we have to meet with discouragement and opposition in various forms.
Even the enlightened and well-intentioned hold back incredulous. This form of opposition finally examines, being led thereto from motives of economy and the promptings of humanity; it usually approves and assists, but is often carried back by indolence, when it discovers that it must join us in the loud battle we are forced to wage all along the line against fierce interests and bitter prejudices.
We attack with slender array, but unflinching purpose, the gloomy powers of ignorance that are allied to doubt and indifference. These contend under the prestige of a thousand years of possession.
Ignorance and Prejudice are twin giants that renew their life upon each other; they are as old as chaos, and are invulnerable to the weapons of ordinary warfare. Like the fallen angels, they are—
"Vital in every part,
And can but by annihilation die."
One of the Greek fables, typifying the struggle of man against circumstances, was a story of the battle between Hercules and Antæus, son of the Earth. The fight was long and doubtful, for whenever the mortal was felled to the ground by the power of the vigorous god, his force was renewed by contact with the breast of his mother Earth, and he sprang to his feet and recommenced the never-ending strife.
This contest between the god, and the mortal born of earth and sea, is the poetical type of the unceasing toil of man in the Valley of the Nile, against the sandy waves of the Lybian desert, always encroaching upon the cultivated soil, and demanding year by year new exertions to repress their advance.
So, in our attempt to establish a better system of utilizing the powers of the horse in the service of man, we have each day to meet the same enemy, renewed by contact with the sources that foster and reinforce ignorance. But as persistent labor conducted the beneficent waters of the Nile in irrigating channels through the arid plain of the desert, until upon the inhospitable edge gardens bloomed, fields of grain waved in the breeze, and the date-palm cast its grateful shade upon the husbandman—so we make healthful progress, and enjoy a widely increasing triple reward—first, in the thankful esteem of our fellow men; secondly, in the relief we afford to a noble animal; and last, in the substantial return which the highest authority has adjudged to honest labor.