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.