Before we can rightly understand the degradation which has befallen us by reason of the Turf, we must examine the position of jockeys in the community.  Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his most wicked sentences, said that the jockey is our Western substitute for the eunuch; a noble duke, who ought to know something about the matter, lately informed the world through the medium of a court of law with an oath that “jockeys are thieves.”  Now, I know one jockey whose character is not embraced by the duke’s definition, and I have heard that there are two, but I am not acquainted with the second man.  The wonder is, considering the harebrained, slavering folly of the public, that any of the riding manikins are half as honest as they are; the wonder is that their poor little horsey brains are not led astray in such fashion as to make every race a farce.  They certainly do try their best on occasion, and I believe that there are many races which are not arranged before the start; but you cannot persuade the picked men of the rascals’ corps that any race is run fairly.  When Melton and Paradox ran their tremendous race home in the Derby, I heard quite a number of intelligent gentry saying that Paradox should have won but for the adjectived and participled propensities of his jockey.  Nevertheless, although most devout turfites agree with the emphatic duke, they do not idolize their diminutive fetishes a whit the less; they worship the manikin with a touching and droll devotion, and, when they know him to be a confirmed scamp, they admire his cleverness, and try to find out which way the little rogue’s interest lies, so that they may follow him.  So it comes about that we have amidst us a school of skinny dwarfs whose leaders are paid better than the greatest statesmen in Europe.  The commonest jockey-boy in this company of manikins can usually earn more than the average scholar or professional man, and the whole set receive a good deal more of adulation than has been bestowed on any soldier, sailor, explorer, or scientific man of our generation.  And what is the life-history of the jockey?  A tiny boy is bound apprentice, and submitted to the discipline of a training stable; he goes through the long routine of morning gallops, trials, and so forth, and when he begins to show signs of aptitude he is put up to ride for his master in public.  If he is a born horseman, like Archer or Robinson, he may make his mark long before his indentures are returned to him, and he is at once surrounded by a horde of flatterers who do their best to spoil him.  There is no cult so distinguished by slavishness, by gush, by lavishness, as jockey-worship, and a boy needs to have a strong head and sound, careful advisers, if he is to escape becoming positively insufferable.  When the lad Robinson won the St. Leger, after his horse had been left at the post, he was made recipient of the most frantic and silly toadyism that the mind can conceive; the clever trainer to whom he was apprenticed