A PERUSAL of the daily papers would lead one to the belief that racing, socially speaking, had just been discovered in New York. No account whatsoever is taken by the cheerful metropolitan of the rest of the country, though racing is going on from California to Washington, from Chicago to New Orleans—indeed, it is to the South that we go for both our hunters and our thoroughbreds. All through the Southern States there are little sporting communities hunting a pack of hounds, whose runs, if they took place in the neighborhood of New York, would be reported in all our papers by the society, not the sporting, editor.

For our thoroughbreds we still go to Kentucky. It was only the other day that I heard the owner of one of the great stock farms there complaining of the ignorance and extravagance of one of our younger Northern racing men, who sent his trainer South to buy, at any figure that he chose.

Washington, though now more cosmopolitan than Southern, gives, from the social standpoint, warm encouragement to racing. In all our cities now there seems to be growing up a young married coterie—parallel to the fashionable circle in New York. Such a characteristic little group is to be found in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Baltimore and in Washington. This coterie, which is neither of diplomacy nor yet of old-time Washington, gives special attention to the Bennings track. Not but what the younger diplomats are to be found there, on Saturdays, when they are able to get away from their embassies and legations. Miss Roosevelt is an enthusiastic spectator. Oddly enough, in contrast to our Northern tracks, it seems to be permissible for two girls to go alone together to Bennings without escort. Maidens of careful upbringing may be seen stepping from the trolley at the race track as coolly as if it were a county fair.

If the New York papers take no account, socially speaking, of all these tracks, it is scarcely to be expected that their memories should go back as far as Jerome Park. It was a poor course, I am told, with bad turns and obscure corners, but prettier to look at than any we have had since. The lawn in front of the clubhouse—which was separated from the grand stand by the whole width of the track—was crowded by the members of a society smaller but more complete than Morris Park or Sheepshead has ever seen.

The opening of Belmont Park is destined, probably, to make a difference, to emphasize again the social side of the sport. The country club on the grounds—the club within a club, as it were—will draw a different set of people from those whom a mere jockey club can attract. It will be used quite independently of any question of racing by all the little communities of Long Island. If Hempstead and Westbury and Roslyn and Cedarhurst will come there to dine, and use it as the object of an automobile trip or a drive, there will be a well-established social life connected with it before the next race meeting opens.

I do not believe that any nation derives, as a whole, quite the delight from a race track that we do—with our Puritan traditions. To the English it is the national sport; to the French the extravagance of the smartest people; but to us, though both these elements may enter in, it is an intense excitement, which many of us have been brought up to think wicked. The mere word “horse-racing” would have struck terror to the hearts of our grandmothers, and thus a sport perfectly harmless to most of us has acquired a most alluring flavor of naughtiness. It is this feeling, this common sense of emancipation, that holds together a race-going crowd with a general sense of gayety. For as a nation we are not conspicuous for gayety. If we do not take our amusements solemnly, like the English, we at least take them strenuously. In this respect, racing has changed a good deal in the last twenty years. We are a little more serious about it than we used to be. In my recollection of the old days at Jerome Park, the clubhouse—certainly the feminine portion of it—took the sport itself much more lightly. The drive out in somebody’s coach, and the wonderful clothes one could wear and see, were the most important features of the day. You did not find the ladies in the paddock, as you see them now. Nor did they as openly transfer crisp bills from their own pretty purses to the bookies. Mild “pools,” in which one drew for one’s number quite irrespective of tips and inside information, were the only ladylike form of betting. There was something quite casual and social in the way in which everybody sat about on the lawn, under, I verily believe, the most brilliant parasols that the world has ever seen; the clubhouse behind us, and on the side a long line of coaches. It was a very long line, yet we could all tell them at a glance.

But this has changed now. Automobiles have driven out coaches. Not but what one still sees them, beautifully appointed, at any track; but instead of being the chosen means of locomotion for the fortunate, they are merely a picturesque way of wasting time. The consequence is that at Belmont Park one notices a distinct modification in the gorgeousness of the women’s clothes. In this country we have never gone the lengths of English women, whose clothes at Ascot and Epsom seemed to me quite as suitable to a ballroom. Still, our best dressed women have always felt hitherto that the races afforded a unique opportunity—especially when approached on the top of a smart coach. At Jerome and even at Morris Park, where New York could pour out in electric hansoms, this was still the rule, but to Belmont Park the trip in an automobile over dusty Long Island roads, or even on the Long Island Railroad, will not permit the same elaborate dressing.

It is not, however, only the chance to see and wear good clothes that gives races their charm to feminine eyes. Perhaps their chief attraction is the flavor of the great world. The penalty of leading a sheltered life is having a limited outlook, and the obverse of being select is being narrow. Women are beginning to see this. Society is unquestionably growing more and more friendly to the successful outsider, the people who are, as the phrase is, “doing something.” So far literary stars have had the main share of notice, but great actresses, great artists, even great scientists, have nowadays much more attention paid to them than the merely well-bred and socially available can hope for. Even the most exclusive of our great ladies no longer take pride in never having heard the name of anyone outside their own circle. We have not become such lion hunters as the Londoners, but we enjoy very much having pointed out to us, here a great plunger from Chicago, there a dancer never before seen but from across the footlights. The race track is an excellent field for such experiences. Not, of course, that these experiences must be carried too far. It is one thing to see the celebrities of the stage, but quite another to hear them calling our husbands and brothers by their first names. A recent instance of this kind has been brought to the attention, so it is said, of the governors of Belmont Park, with the result that box holders have been implored to be more circumspect in their choice of guests.

But of all our tracks, Saratoga offers the most amusing phases to the observer of things social. Smart New York appears to think that Saratoga ceased to exist from the time when it was no longer the Newport of our grandmothers, until rediscovered in the interests of racing by the late Mr. William C. Whitney. The true situation is infinitely more amusing.

Saratoga, with its enormous hotels, teeming with a society busy and well entertained, has been perfectly satisfied with itself in spite of the fact that smart New York knew it not. The United States Hotel has represented all that was socially delightful to many people who never heard of the “Four Hundred.” And now suddenly into this community comes the smartest of New York’s racing section—the Whitneys, the Mackays, the Wilsons and the young Vanderbilts, and several more of like sort. And not only do they come, but they come under circumstances that render almost impossible the exclusiveness that has been regarded as essential. This year, I believe, the Mackays and a few others are renting separate houses, but hitherto it has been hotel life for everybody. Hotel life, which New Yorkers so scorn! A “cottage”—i.e., a suite of connecting rooms in a great caravansary—was the utmost seclusion possible. After the publicity of the race track, this was the only refuge. Then to meet the crowd again at dinner at Canfield’s (the ladies penetrated no further than the dining room even in the palmy days), and later, perhaps, to listen to the band at the Grand Union. This is a life in contrast to the seclusion of the cliffs at Newport. Verily racing makes strange companions.

There is something particularly gay in the atmosphere of the place. Any serious business other than racing is so plainly lacking. As the meeting is in summer, a great many men choose their holiday so as to take it in. The result is that we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a class of idle men—at leisure and eager to be amused, almost like a foreign community. No one who has been to Saratoga will ever repeat the worn platitude that American men do not know how to enjoy a holiday.

We must remember, too, that for the feminine element racing is one of the few opportunities for—can we use so ferocious a term as “gambling” for the risking of a mild fiver on a “sure thing”? People are fond of saying that women are born gamblers; meaning, I suppose, that they love it better than men do. But it seems to me that this is only half the truth. The element of chance has charms for all of us, and women have so few opportunities to indulge it. They do not usually speculate in Wall Street; their daily occupation is not a gamble, as so many businesses are; the private wager is almost unknown to them. Until bridge swept over us, women could not, while spending as much money as they pleased, have any of the fun of losing it. Perhaps, in spite of all the talk about the intellectual stimulation of bridge, it owes some of its popularity to the same causes that the races do.

Not but what I believe that the interest of many women is a truly sporting one. Feminine love and knowledge of horses have increased wonderfully in the last twenty-five years. Our mothers and grandmothers rode, but took it as an elegant relaxation, or even as a mere means of locomotion. In this country the true sportswoman—the woman who hunts and drives four-in-hand and tandem—is a fairly recent development. In England we have only to go back to the novels of Whyte Melville to see that even in the middle of the last century she was a known type. It is not at all uncommon for women over there to know quite as much about horses as their brothers, to understand the horses and the cattle and the pigs. For Englishwomen to own a racing stable is no novelty, while here the joint experiment of two of our best known ladies was very much talked about, and endured but a short time.

The sport is essentially a sport for men. Women are merely onlookers; and in so far as it has a social side, even that side is controlled by men, serving thus as the great exception to things social.

Naturally we assume that the majority of men who go into racing go into it for the love of the sport itself. Yet we cannot look about us and see the men who have not only no knowledge of racing, but no knowledge of horses, even their own, without asking what is the inducement that has led them to take it up.

There are a good many answers. In the first place, there is the prestige. You buy a racing stable, and your name is known not only to your equals—the other owners, the members of the jockey clubs—but to every office boy who “plays the ponies,” to every great lady who wants a competent guide to the paddock. Mr. Belmont may build subways and conduct gigantic banking operations, but it is as the man who named Belmont Park that he is known to a majority of his fellow countrymen. The racegoing community is an epitome of all society, from the “tout” and the beggar to the multi-millionaire. A real aristocracy can be built on so well organized a foundation, and the owner of a great stable has the flattery of all classes in his little world.

Then, too, it is the sign and symbol of great wealth. Some men prefer to tell you how rich they are; others load their wives with jewels, or endow universities. Others, again, set up a racing stable. It is a process that sets them in a small class apart.

But even in a society as materialistic as ours, the outward symbol is not everything. A house on the east side of the park, a perfectly appointed carriage, a steam yacht—these are valuable instruments to those destined to “get on,” but can by themselves affect very little for those who are not so destined. Cold-blooded as the inter-relations of society seem to be, they are, nevertheless, human relations, and can never be achieved by mere things, however much we may hear to the contrary. Knowing this, women who desire social advancement always seek it through the means of friendships.

But men! The spectacle of a man struggling for social success was rare a few years ago. It was always supposed to be the wives and daughters of our self-made men who waged the combat. But nowadays, as society and business are growing closer and closer, as more of our great financiers take prominent social positions, as prominent social positions become a more and more valuable asset, we find, as we are bound to, that men desire such positions more and more.

This is the damaging suspicion that clings to men who go into racing after a past ignorant of horseflesh—the suspicion that they are using the sport as a means of social advancement. Many people who ought to know will tell you that no such advantage is offered by racing, and will point to the veterans of the turf whose names have never been heard socially. But the answer to this is that such men had no ulterior motive, and would not have wanted social honors, even if they had come.

Even in countries where the sport is more seriously taken than here, this social element mingles with it. In France racing is the special amusement of the fastest set—not of the vieille noblesse, but of Monsieur Blanc of dry goods fame, of that set who has imported its clothes and its slang from England, the set whose men cannot be told from well-bred Englishmen, the set who has invented “le sport.” To penetrate this set is almost impossible for a foreigner. Indeed, the only representative of the Vanderbilt family who has gone into racing at all has done so in France. Perhaps even for him some little aid was necessary in that difficult circle.

In England, again, the situation is different. The turf is the serious and respected sport of all classes. London is literally empty the day of the Derby. Many of the most honored names in England have been, or are, connected with a great racing stable. It is bound to have also an important social aspect. The winning of the Derby has always been so eagerly desired by Americans that one is justified in suspecting that the social prominence attracts them. Yet here the very seriousness of the English attitude toward their favorite sport is clearly to be seen. The Englishman is quick to detect an unsportsmanlike attitude; and to use the “sport of kings” for social purposes is a thing he finds it hard to forgive.

Over there it is most literally the “sport of kings,” for it must, if successfully followed, bring you sooner or later into contact with the king himself. This apparently is not always the most agreeable of experiences, if the story is true that one of our most conspicuous expatriates, who has been racing over there, has been almost forced out of it on account of a breach of etiquette. It seems he bid against the king for the possession of a certain horse, and bid higher than his majesty cared to go. The gentleman who was representing the king was immensely incensed, and has taken steps to prevent such audacious competition. Yet to republican eyes it seems rather hard that the king’s bid should of itself preclude all others.

Here the position of racing is so much more ambiguous. It has not the respect of the country at large. It does not make one beloved or even celebrated in the world outside the track. No political capital could be made out of it. As to its social uses, I think it is fair to say that, while no social advantage necessarily follows, it offers an immense opportunity to those clever enough to take advantage of it.

For the main difficulty in the way of the social aspirant is the first step—is in getting to know two or three of the right people—two or three are often sufficient. A large yacht may be a powerful recommendation, but let her owner once fill her with the wrong people, and he were better without her. To make yourself conspicuous is fatal unless your companions are those whom the world envies. To advertise yourself is, alas! too often to advertise your undesirable friendships. Many men seem to think that a coach is the safe road to success, and will drive round and round the park secure in the knowledge that their appointments are perfect and their horses the best, not knowing that the effect is being ruined by their guests, who are evidently unknown to the world of fashion. The idea seems to be that it is quite safe to begin with “frumps,” that they are better than no one. But this is a great mistake. Solitude has its dignity. Common friends have none at all. It is not easy to progress from them to the more exclusive. Once you have identified yourself with the wrong people, the right ones insist on believing that that is the kind you really prefer.

For the rich bachelor there are just two avenues of social ambition. He may become attentive to a smart girl not so accustomed to attention as to be overcritical, or if he is above this sort of thing, I know of nothing so hopeful as racing. Here is a sport in which he may become known without forming undesirable social ties, without proclaiming his acquaintance with undesirable people. There is a chance for him to meet men of the best position in an atmosphere congenial to friendship—a mutual interest in a great sport. At the same time there is no role in which a man may appear better than in that of a straightforward and generous sportsman.