The Broken Link Handicapped by Rudyard Kipling

While the snaffle holds, or the "long-neck" stings, / While the big beam tilts, or the last bell rings, / While horses are horses to train and to race, / Then women and wine take a second place / For me -- for me -- / While a short "ten-three" / Has a field to squander or fence to face! / Song of the G. R.

There are more ways of running a horse to suit your book than pulling / his head off in the straight. Some men forget this. Understand clearly / that all racing is rotten -- as everything connected with losing money / must be. Out here, in addition to its inherent rottenness, it has the / merit of being two-thirds sham; looking pretty on paper only. Every one / knows every one else far too well for business purposes. How on earth / can you rack and harry and post a man for his losings, when you are fond / of his wife, and live in the same Station with him? He says, "on the / Monday following, I can't settle just yet. " You say, "All right, old / man," and think your self lucky if you pull off nine hundred out of / a two-thousand rupee debt. Any way you look at it, Indian racing is / immoral, and expensively immoral. Which is much worse. If a man wants / your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a subscription-list, / instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian larrikin; / a "brumby," with as much breed as the boy; a brace of chumars in / gold-laced caps; three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a / switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in / her flag. Racing leads to the shroff quicker than anything else. But / if you have no conscience and no sentiments, and good hands, and some / knowledge of pace, and ten years' experience of horses, and several / thousand rupees a month, I believe that you can occasionally contrive to / pay your shoeing-bills.