Do not understand me to depreciate the value of riding-schools, nor the training which they inculcate. On the contrary, School-training carried far enough and properly given is just what I do advocate. But between the riding-school and School-riding, there is a great gulf fixed. The capital letter is advisedly used. A horse which has been given a good mouth, and has been taught as far as the volte and demi-volte, simple and reversed (though indeed the riding-school volte and the volte of the Haute Ecole are different things), certainly knows a fairish amount, and may be able to teach his rider much of what he knows. But riding in a school is not road-riding, although a school-horse may have profited well by his education. Leaping a school hurdle is not riding to hounds. A thoroughly good riding-school horse may be a very brute when in the park. Perfect manners within four walls may disappear so soon as the horse gets a clear mile ahead of him. Assuredly, it is well enough to learn the rudiments at a good riding-school. But if you ever want to become a thorough horseman and have equally good horses, study the art for yourself,--there is no mystery about it,--and learn what a horse should know and how to teach him. When you have done this, you will have a satisfactory saddle beast. If you expect a groom or a riding-school master to train your horses for you, you will not have a perfect mouth or good manners once in a hundred times. If the master is expert, he will be too busy to do your horses full justice short of an exorbitant honorarium. The groom is, as a rule, both ignorant and impatient, if not brutal.
I know of no better foundation for a man to begin upon than the breaking-in to harness, which an American horse has usually received at the hands of an intelligent farmer, before he is brought to the city for sale. Starting with the horse, then, say at five years old, if you will learn how to give him his saddle education, and do it yourself, you will have, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a better saddle beast in six months than any groom can, or any riding-master is apt to make.
There is somewhat of a tendency among the English, and much more among their American imitators, to decry as unnecessary the training of horses beyond a mouth somewhat short of leather and two or three easy road gaits; or, in hunters, the capacity to do well cross-country. But there is vastly more to be said on the side of High School training. By a three months' School course stubborn horses may be made tractable, dangerous horses rendered comparatively safe, uncomfortable brutes easy and reliable. Vices may be cured, stumbling may be made far less dangerous, if the habit cannot be eradicated, physical defects, unfitting a horse for saddle work, may often be overcome, and the general utility of the average horse vastly increased. All this, and much more, may be done, without touching upon the gain in ease to the rider, the pleasure to be derived when both man and beast are enabled to work in unison, the ability schooling gives to the weakest hand to hold the most high-strung horse, and the great variety of motions, speeds, and paces which may be taught to subserve the comfort and delight of the rider. Whoso will claim that the reader of the last French play enjoys as great a privilege and pleasure as the student of Hamlet, or that the day laborer is the equal of the skilled artisan, may deny the utility of schooling the horse for saddle work. No reference is here intended to be made to racing-stock, or to hunters kept as such. These stand in a class by themselves, requiring different aptitudes and treatment.