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Here is a queer kind of a world which has suddenly arisen! Faith and trust are banished; real honesty is unknown; purity is less than a name; manliness means no more than a certain readiness to use the fists. Most of the dwellers in this atmosphere are punctilious about money payments because they durst not be otherwise, but the fine flower of real probity does not flourish in the mephitic air. To lie, to dodge, to take mean advantages–these are the accomplishments which an ugly percentage of middle-class youths cultivate, and all the mischief arises from the fact that they persist in trying to ape the manners of the most unworthy members of an order to which they do not belong. It is bad enough when a rich and idle man is bitten with the taste for betting, but when he is imitated by the tailor’s assistant who carries his clothes home, then we have a still more unpleasant phenomenon to consider. For it is fatal to a nation when any large and influential section of the populace once begin to be confused in their notions of right and wrong. Not long ago I was struck by noticing a significant instance of this moral dry rot. An old racing man died, and all the sporting papers had something to say about him and his career. Now the best of the sporting journalists are clever and cultured gentlemen, who give refinement, to every subject that they touch. But a certain kind of writing is done by pariahs, who are not much of a credit to our society, and I was interested by the style in which these scribbling vermin spoke of the dead man. Their gush was a trifle nauseating; their mean worship of money gave one a shiver, and the relish with which they described their hero’s exploits would have been comic were it not for the before-mentioned nausea.

It seemed that the departed turfite had been–to use blunt English–a very skilful and successful swindler. He would buy a horse which took his fancy, and he would run the animal again and again, until people got tired of seeing such a useless brute taken down to the starting-point. The handicappers finally let our schemer’s horse in at a trifling weight, and then he prepared for business. He had trustworthy agents at Manchester, Nottingham, and Newcastle, and these men contrived, without rousing suspicion, to “dribble” money into the market in a stealthy way, until the whole of their commission was worked on very advantageous terms. The arch-plotter did not show prominently in the transaction, and he contrived once or twice to throw dust in the eyes of the very cleverest men. One or two neatly arranged strokes secured our acute gentleman a handsome fortune. He missed L70,000 once, by a short head, but this was the only instance in which his plans seriously failed; and he was looked up to as an epitome of all the virtues which are most acceptable in racing circles. Well, had this dodger exhibited the heroism of Gordon, the benevolence of Lord Shaftesbury, the probity of Henry Fawcett, he could not have been more bepraised and bewailed by the small fry of sporting literature. All he had done in life was to deceive people by making them fancy that certain good horses were bad ones: strictly speaking, he made money by false pretences, and yet, such is the twist given by association with genuine gamblers, that educated men wrote of him as if he had been a saint of the most admirable order. This disposition is seen all through the piece: successful roguery is glorified, and our young men admire “the Colonel,” or “the Captain,” or Jack This and Tom That, merely because the Captain and the Colonel and Jack and Tom are acute rascals who have managed to make money. Decidedly, our national ideals are in a queer way. Just think of a little transaction which occurred in 1887. A noble lord ordered a miserable jockey boy to pull a horse, so that the animal might lose a race: the exalted guide of youth was found out, and deservedly packed off the Turf; but it was only by an accident that the Stewards were able to catch him. That legislator had funny notions of the duty which he owed to boyhood: he asked his poor little satellite to play the scoundrel, and he only did what scores do who are not found out.