if they can gain their ends; their unbalanced, sharp little minds are always open to temptation; they see their brethren amassing great fortunes, and they naturally fall into line and proceed, when their turn comes, to grab as much money as they can.  Not long ago the inland revenue officials, after minute investigation, assessed the gains of one wee creature at L9,000 per year.  This pigmy is now twenty-six years of age, and he earned as much as the Lord Chancellor, and more than any other judge, until a jury decided his fate by giving him what the Lord Chief Justice called “a contemptuous verdict.”  Another jockey paid income-tax on L10,000 a year, and a thousand pounds is not at all an uncommon sum to be paid merely as a retainer.  Forty or fifty years ago a jockey would not have dreamed of facing his employer otherwise than cap in hand, but the value of stable-boys has gone up in the market, and Lear’s fool might now say, “Handy-Dandy!  Who is your jockey now and who is your master?” The little men gradually gather a kind of veneer of good manners, and some of them can behave very much like pocket editions of gentlemen, but the scent of the stable remains, and, whether the jockey is a rogue or passably honest, he remains a stable-boy to the end.  Half the mischief on the Turf arises from the way in which these overpaid, spoilt menials can be bribed, and, certes, there are plenty of bribers ready.  Racing men do not seem able to shake off the rule of their stunted tyrants.  When the gentleman who paid income-tax on nine thousand a year brought the action which secured him the contemptuous verdict, the official handicapper to the Jockey Club declared on oath that the jockey’s character was “as bad as bad can be.”  The starter and a score of other witnesses followed in the same groove, and yet this man was freely employed.  Why?  We may perhaps explain by inference presently.

With this cynically corrupt corps of jockeys and their hangers-on, it may easily be seen that the plutocrats who manipulate the Turf wires have an admirable time of it, while the great gaping mob of zanies who go to races, and zanies who stay at home, are readily bled by the fellows who have the money and the “information” and the power.  The rule of the Turf is easily formulated:—­“Get the better of your neighbour.  Play the game outwardly according to fair rules.  Pay like a man if your calculations prove faulty, but take care that they shall be as seldom faulty as possible.  Never mind what you pay for information if it gives you a point the better of other men.  Keep your agents honest if you can, but, if they happen to be dishonest under pressure of circumstances, take care at any rate that you are not found out.”  In short, the Ring is mainly made up of men who pay with scrupulous honesty when they lose, but who take uncommonly good care to reduce the chances of losing to a minimum.  Are they in the wrong?  It depends.  I shall not, at the present moment, go into details; I prefer to pause