As the Bible makes a favorite of the horse, the patriarch and the prophet and the evangelist and the apostle, stroking his sleek hide, and patting his rounded neck, and tenderly lifting his exquisitely formed hoof, and listening with a thrill to the champ of his bit, so all great natures in all ages have spoken of him in encomiastic terms. Virgil in his Georgics almost seems to plagiarize from the description of Job. The Duke of Wellington would not allow any one irreverently to touch his old war-horse, Copenhagen, on whom he had ridden fifteen hours without dismounting at Waterloo; and when old Copenhagen died, his master ordered a military salute fired over his grave. John Howard showed that he did not exhaust all his sympathies in pitying the human race, for when sick he writes home: "Has my old chaise-horse become sick or spoiled?"
But we do not think that the speed of the horse should be cultured at the expense of human degradation. Horse-races, in olden times, were under the ban of Christian people, and in our day the same institution has come up under fictitious names, and it is called a "Summer Meeting," almost suggestive of positive religious exercises. And it is called an "Agricultural Fair," suggestive of everything that is improving in the art of farming. But under these deceptive titles are the same cheating and the same betting, the same drunkenness and the same vagabondage and the same abominations that were to be found under the old horse-racing system.
I never knew a man yet who could give himself to the pleasures of the turf for a long reach of time, and not be battered in morals. They hook up their spanking team, and put on their sporting-cap, and light their cigar, and take the reins, and dash down the road to perdition. The great day at Saratoga, and Long Branch, and Cape May, and nearly all the other watering-places, is the day of the races. The hotels are thronged, nearly every kind of equipage is taken up at an almost fabulous price, and there are many respectable people mingling with jockeys, and gamblers, and libertines, and foul-mouthed men and flashy women. The bar-tender stirs up the brandy-smash. The bets run high. The greenhorns, supposing all is fair, put in their money soon enough to lose it. Three weeks before the race takes place the struggle is decided, and the men in the secret know on which steed to bet their money. The two men on the horses riding around long before arranged who shall beat.
Leaning from the stand or from the carriage are men and women so absorbed in the struggle of bone and muscle and mettle that they make a grand harvest for the pickpockets, who carry off the pocket-books and portemonnaies. Men looking on see only two horses with two riders flying around the ring; but there is many a man on that stand whose honor and domestic happiness and fortune—white mane, white foot, white flank—are in the ring, racing with inebriety, and with fraud, and with profanity, and with ruin—black neck, black foot, black flank. Neck and neck they go in that moral Epsom.
Ah, my friends, have nothing to do with horse-racing dissipations this summer. Long ago the English government got through looking to the turf for the dragoon and light-cavalry horse. They found the turf depreciates the stock, and it is yet worse for men. Thomas Hughes, the member of parliament and the author, known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started in this country, wrote a letter, in which he said: "Heaven help you, then; for of all the cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality holding its head high, to this belauded institution of the British turf." Another famous sportsman writes: "How many fine domains have been shared among these hosts of rapacious sharks during the last two hundred years; and unless the system be altered, how many more are doomed to fall into the same gulf!" The Duke of Hamilton, through his horse-racing proclivities, in three years got through his entire fortune of £70,000, and I will say that some of you are being undermined by it. With the bull-fights of Spain and the bear-baitings of the pit may the Lord God annihilate the infamous and accursed horse-racing of England and America.
III. I go further, and speak of another temptation that hovers over the watering-places; and this is the temptation to sacrifice physical strength. The modern Bethesda was intended to recuperate the physical health; and yet how many come from the watering-places, their health absolutely destroyed! New York and Brooklyn idiots boasting of having imbibed twenty glasses of Congress water before breakfast. Families accustomed to going to bed at ten o'clock at night gossiping until one or two o'clock in the morning. Dyspeptics, usually very cautious about their health, mingling ice-creams, and lemons, and lobster-salads, and cocoa-nuts, until the gastric juices lift up all their voices of lamentation and protest. Delicate women and brainless young men chassezing themselves into vertigo and catalepsy. Thousands of men and women coming back from our watering-places in the autumn with the foundations laid for ailments that will last them all their life long. You know as well as I do that this is the simple truth.
In the summer you say to your good health: "Good-bye, I am going to have a good time for a little while. I will be very glad to see you again in the autumn." Then in the autumn, when you are hard at work in your office, or store, or shop, or counting-room, Good Health will come and say: "Good-bye, I am going." You say: "Where are you going?" "Oh," says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation!" It is a poor rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You coquetted with your good health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you in the winter-time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register in every watering-place: "Do thyself no harm."
IV. Another temptation hovering around the watering-place is to the formation of hasty and life-long alliances. The watering-places are responsible for more of the domestic infelicities of this country than all the other things combined. Society is so artificial there that no sure judgment of character can be formed. Those who form companionships amid such circumstances go into a lottery where there are twenty blanks to one prize. In the severe tug of life you want more than glitter and splash. Life is not a ball-room where the music decides the step, and bow and prance and graceful swing of long trail can make up for strong common sense. You might as well go among the gayly painted yachts of a summer regatta to find war vessels as to go among the light spray of the summer watering-place to find character that can stand the test of the great struggle of human life. Ah, in the battle of life you want a stronger weapon than a lace fan or a croquet mallet! The load of life is so heavy that in order to draw it, you want a team stronger than one made up of a masculine grasshopper and a feminine butterfly.
If there is any man in the community that excites my contempt, and that ought to excite the contempt of every man and woman, it is the soft-handed, soft-headed fop, who, perfumed until the air is actually sick, spends his summer in taking killing attitudes, and waving sentimental adieus, and talking infinitesimal nothings, and finding his heaven in the set of a lavender kid-glove. Boots as tight as an Inquisition, two hours of consummate skill exhibited in the tie of a flaming cravat, his conversation made up of "Ah's" and "Oh's" and "He-hee's." It would take five hundred of them stewed down to make a teaspoonful of calves-foot jelly. There is only one counterpart to such a man as that, and that is the frothy young woman at the watering-place, her conversation made up of French moonshine; what she has on her head only equaled by what she has on her back; useless ever since she was born, and to be useless until she is dead: and what they will do with her in the next world I do not know, except to set her upon the banks of the River Life for eternity to look sweet! God intends us to admire music and fair faces and graceful step, but amid the heartlessness and the inflation and the fantastic influences of our modern watering-places, beware how you make life-long covenants!
V. Another temptation that will hover over the watering-place is that of baneful literature. Almost every one starting off for the summer takes some reading matter. It is a book out of the library or off the bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking books through the cars. I really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year. Men and women who at home would not be satisfied with a book that was not really sensible, I found sitting on hotel-piazzas or under the trees reading books the index of which would make them blush if they knew that you knew what the book was.