All games, pastimes, and sports worthy of the name are artificial work. What our ancestors did because they must to live, we do because we find that vigorous use of our powers, physical, mental, and moral, makes living more agreeable.

They rode and shot and fished, walked, ran, carried heavy weights, chopped down trees, paddled canoes, sailed boats, fought wild beasts, hunted game for food, and drove oxen, mules, and horses because they had to do these things to live.

We do many of these same things. We chop down trees, paddle canoes, sail boats, run, jump, struggle against one another with the gloves or at football, swim, play golf and tennis, ride and drive, but we call it sport! In reality it is artificial work.

Because the environment has changed, and we are no longer forced to do these things for a living and to live at all, we now do them to make our own living more wholesome and agreeable, and call these pursuits sports.

Either because human life originally was safest to those who were most formidable at work and at war, or because we are so constituted that we cannot live without exercise, we still continue the physical exertions of our forebears under the name of sport.

The quality and the value of all games and sports may be tested and graded as to their respective value according as they develop in their patrons the qualities that hard work develops. Health, courage, serenity of spirit, good manners, good nerves, tenacity of purpose, physical strength, were the reward of the hard worker. Those same qualities ought to be the aim of the good sportsman. The moment trickery, effeminacy, babyism, and unfair play become a part of sport, the whole object of sport, its raison d'Être, vanishes.

Sport, therefore, has ample excuse for being, and deserves the support of all serious well-wishers of their fellow-men to keep it clean.

The more seriously, then, sport is undertaken,—the more nearly it resembles work, in short,—the more completely it accomplishes its purpose. It goes without saying that when sport absorbs the whole man it defeats its own aim, since it is intended merely to supplement by artifice what has been lost by the changes in man's environment. Now that shooting, fishing, sailing, sparring, riding, driving, are not necessities, we wish to retain still the good results of them for men doomed by the rearrangement of life to live more or less sedentary lives.

Hence it is that books are written on these subjects, that men may take them up seriously, study them, use their heads at them, and thus get the best there is out of them. The men who are best worth preserving are just the men who will give but a half-hearted allegiance to anything, unless it asks much of them and makes large drafts upon their mental, moral, and physical energy.

To discover to man or boy, therefore, how much there is of training for his mind and his body in any form of sport is well worth while. The more clear it is that a sport or game requires knowledge, patience, courage, tact, and endurance, all of which make for success in everyday life, the more likely it is that it will become popular among sturdy men.

The best of our sports and games are, as we should expect, the most difficult, and require the most complete development in their patrons. Chess, whist, cricket, golf, fencing, sparring, riding across country, hunting, fishing, have kept their place, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. All these games have been played for centuries, while the more childish pastimes and sports come and go, and ping-pong their way to an early oblivion. The subject of this book, the horse and how to handle him in harness, has not only the advantage of a sport requiring much knowledge, and good physical ability, and great moral self-control, but it has the further very great advantage of teaching all who take part in it something of what is due to the welfare of the most useful animal in the world. This sport not only develops its patron, but in so doing makes for the development and better care of the most valuable helpmeet man has.

It is absurd to suppose that a man can be taught to drive without knowing something of the elementary things about the horse. He may be put upon the box, the reins placed in his hands, and certain cut-and-dried instructions given him about stopping, starting, and turning; but before he has driven five miles fifty things will occur to him that he will wish to know about. A child with a box of colors and some sketches in outline can be told to paint this part red, that part blue, that white, the other green, and so on, and there follows a picture of a kind. But the painter knows how and why the colors are mixed, and could never be more than an automaton if he did not study these things for himself. A man on a box-seat with four reins in his hand, who does not know how the horses in front of him are housed, fed, shod, harnessed, and bitted, and how by evolution they came to be what they are physically and mentally, and the relative positions of their vital organs and the bones of their skeletons, is not and will not be a coachman of any competency until he knows something of these things. No man can bit a horse who knows nothing of the inside of a horse's mouth; nor can he fit him properly with his collar unless he knows the relative positions of the shoulder-blade and humerus; nor can he see that his shoes are put on to fit him unless he knows something of the formation of his foot; nor can he spare him fatigue and help him through his simpler troubles on the road, or in the stable, unless he knows something of the horse's physical make-up and the weak and strong points of him.

It is a great sport, is driving, and superior to all other sports in one respect at least, in that it is the most useful of sports. Any improvement in the art of driving actually adds to the wealth of the world (vide chapter on the Economic Value of the Horse).

In this book we have begun at the beginning, and the proper title of the book would be, Hints on the History, Housing, Harnessing, and Handling of the Horse. Each one of these subjects would require a volume, and volumes indeed have been written. A complete bibliography of horse literature would number well on toward three thousand volumes.

In this small volume it is intended to suggest to horse owners the necessary lines of knowledge, with something more than the elements of each. The bibliography at the end of the volume offers the opportunity to go more deeply into any or all of these departments as taste, fancy, or love of the sport may dictate. No one volume can do more than this, and to each individual is given the opportunity to discover what he ought to know, and the opportunity to supplement his knowledge according to his particular requirements.

For suggestions, good counsel, and valuable information I am indebted to many. Among them I must mention here R. W. Rives, Esq.; Frank K. Sturgis, Esq.; Professor Henry F. Osborn, of the Natural History Museum; William Pollock, Esq.; Theodore Frelinghuysen, Esq., Captain Pirie, and Fownes of London; Howlett pÈre of Paris, and his son Morris Howlett, now of New York; T. Suffern Tailer, Esq., late president of the New York Tandem Club; and others. They will, I trust, forgive my errors, and take to themselves, as they deserve to do, the credit for such value as this small volume has, in adding to the comfort of drivers and the welfare of the horse.