2.
To eat bread in the sweat of his brow is the original punishment of mankind; the indolence of the savage shrinks from the obligation, and looks out for methods of escaping it. Corn, wine, and oil have no charms for him at such a price; he turns to the brute animals which are his aboriginal companions, the horse, the cow, and the sheep; he chooses to be a grazier rather than to till the ground. He feeds his horses, flocks, and herds on its spontaneous vegetation, and then in turn he feeds himself on their flesh. He remains on one spot while the natural crop yields them sustenance; when it is exhausted, he migrates to another. He adopts, what is called, the life of a nomad. In maritime countries indeed he must have recourse to other expedients; he fishes in the stream, or among the rocks of the beach.[2] In the woods he betakes himself to roots and wild honey; or he has a resource in the chase, an occupation, ever ready at hand, exciting, and demanding no perseverance. But when the savage finds himself inclosed in the continent and the wilderness, he draws the domestic animals about him, and constitutes himself the head of a sort of brute polity. He becomes a king and father of the beasts, and by the economical arrangements which this pretension involves, advances a first step, though a low one, in civilization, which the hunter or the fisher does not attain.
And here, beyond other animals, the horse is the instrument of that civilization. It enables him to govern and to guide his sheep and cattle; it carries him to the chase, when he is tempted to it; it transports him and his from place to place; while his very locomotion and shifting location and independence of the soil define the idea, and secure the existence, both of a household and of personal property. Nor is this all which the horse does for him; it is food both in its life and in its death;—when dead, it nourishes him with its flesh, and, while alive, it supplies its milk for an intoxicating liquor which, under the name of koumiss, has from time immemorial served the Tartar instead of wine or spirits. The horse then is his friend under all circumstances, and inseparable from him; he may be even said to live on horseback, he eats and sleeps without dismounting, till the fable has been current that he has a centaur's nature, half man and half beast. Hence it was that the ancient Saxons had a horse for their ensign in war; thus it is that the Ottoman ordinances are, I believe, to this day dated from "the imperial stirrup," and the display of horsetails at the gate of the palace is the Ottoman signal of war. Thus too, as the Catholic ritual measures intervals by "a Miserere," and St Ignatius in his Exercises by "a Pater Noster," so the Turcomans and the Usbeks speak familiarly of the time of a gallop. But as to houses, on the other hand, the Tartars contemptuously called them the sepulchres of the living, and, when abroad, could hardly be persuaded to cross a threshold. Their women, indeed, and children could not live on horseback; them some kind of locomotive dwelling must receive, and a less noble animal must draw. The old historians and poets of Greece and Rome describe it, and the travellers of the middle ages repeat and enlarge the classical description of it The strangers from Europe gazed with astonishment on huge wattled houses set on wheels, and drawn by no less than twenty-two oxen.