Horses and Roads. By "Free-lance." (Longmans and Co.)— " Man's
inhumanity to man" is open to objection, but his ignorant cruelty to the animals whose lives are worn out in his service is absolutely inexcusable. In Horses and Roads, "Free-lance" vigor- ously indicates the countless evils due to want of brakes, dosing, bad stabling, and, above all, to shoeing. He advocates no shoeing, main- taining, with much plausibility, that shoes are not only useless, but
injurious to an incalculable degree. We should be glad if some public-spirited horse-owner would undertake a trial of three methods —the ordinary plan of driving nails into living substance, next the Charlier, then the natural—and put the results before the public. If all the owners of horses in the kingdom would read, examine, and test the remarks of "Free-lance," the horses would come to the conclusion that an equine millennium had arrived.
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