JOCKEY
.—This term, in its particular and most confined signification, implies the person who actually rides a horse for PLATE, MATCH, SUBSCRIPTION, SWEEPSTAKES, or any other PRIZE; but custom and provincial forms have been productive of local deviations. To say in one district, that any man is "a good jockey," means no more, than that he is a good HORSEMAN. In another, to say he is "quite A JOCKEY," is to communicate an idea, that he is very little, if any, better than a swindler, and exceedingly well qualified to jockey any person with whom he has a trading transaction. Horse-dealers, till within the last half century, passed under the regular denomination of jockies in every market town and country fair in the kingdom; from which indefinite description they are now relieved by the kind intention of his Majesty's Ministers, who have since STAMPED them with a badge of professional dignity, and enjoined an annual pecuniary contribution for the distinction.
Jockey, in the present universal acceptation of the word with the superior classes of society, as well as the sporting world at large, is applied merely to the RIDERS of RUNNING HORSES; upon the prevailing superiority of whose speed, and the untainted integrity of the JOCKIES who are entrusted to regulate that SPEED, immense sums annually depend. Where so much unlimited confidence is reposed, it is almost natural to conclude, an adequate integrity would be insured. Time, that unerring monitor, and invariable criterion of truth, has long since demonstrated the fallacy of such philosophic and philanthropic expectation: the depravity of human nature has so repeatedly rendered the experiment abortive, that numbers, upon the stroke of whose whip, or the regulation of whose rein, thousands upon thousands were frequently depending, have finished the career of life, without a garment, without a shilling, without the common necessaries of life, and without one friendly finger of commiseration to close the eye of contrite misery, at the tremendous moment of passing that "bourne from whence no traveller returns;" while many other professors of the same art die possessed of an immensity of property. Whether one has been more fortunate than another in always being on the right side, or more fortunate in escaping detection, it is not the privilege or intent of these pages to explore; suffice it, therefore, to observe, that the HONOR, PROBITY, and personal INTEGRITY of a JOCKEY, should, like the VIRTUE of a WOMAN, be not only pure, but unsuspected. Although it is well known large fortunes have been acquired by some individuals intimately and secretly connected with the turf and its dependencies, yet it is not likely that JOCKIES, and their numerous emissaries, should accumulate wealth, unless a very considerable proportion of certainty was invariably annexed to the speculation. See Horse Racing, Turf, and Training.