The Broken-Link Handicap by Rudyard Kipling

While the snaffle holds, or the long-neck slings, / 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. / In India, 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 yourself / 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.