The Manawatu Standard (PUBLISHED DAILY) The Oldest Daily Newspaper on the West Coast. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1886. THE TURF DEMORALIZED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1613, 20 January 1886, Page 2

Manawatu Standard (PUBLISHED DAILY) The Oldest Daily Newspaper on the West Coast. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1886. THE TURF DEMORALIZED.

The following observations occur m m the Quarterly Review: — If we visit the racecourse and take our place on the stand while the horses are going to the post, what a scene, is exhibited below ! The roaring mob of ringmen, making the face of the day hideous; screaming like vultures nocking to the prey — what a truly noble institution is this 1 The less custom the ■ bookmaker ' has, the more frantically he screams the odds ; the respectable men, with whom pur magnanimi juvenes gamble away their patrimony, these are comparatively silent; so are vultures when their, beaks are m. their prey. These are the highspirited men who cheered the Marquis of Hastings when he had stripped himself of an ancestral estate to pay the hundred .thousand pounds which he had lost on Hermit's Derby ; the men who. hooted the broken-hearted youne r nobleman in*o his grave when he could pay no longer. The ring is no doubt an English institution, bnt we have lost many English institutions of late years, and we could spare the betting-ring better than any of those we have lost. . . . . It may be possible to pay too high a price even for perfection to the horse. And if the demoralisation of half the nation,; if broken hearts, desolated homes, thefts, embezzlements,' and worse crimes are part of the price, that price is too high ; would be tqo high though its equivalent were the placing on English soil of the fabled breed of volant Pegasus himself.