To write of the disappearing horse is a solecism, for
there is obviously not the smallest prospect of the dis- appearance of the horse from these islands. Diminution in numbers is quite a different thing from disappearance. The diminution is, of course, inevitable. What is surprising is that the drop in ten years is no more than 33 per cent. In the towns it is double that. What keeps the figure up is the country, and that not merely because the British farmer is conservative, but because he knows the value of horse-manure. In one place—central London—the horse ought actually to disappear com- pletely. His numbers are so few that small injustice would be caused. It is a much greater injustice that long lines of motor-cars and vans and 'buses should be held up, as they perpetually are, by a: single horse-drawn -vehicle moving at a walking-pace of four to five miles an -hour. There can be no solution of the traffic problem while that continues.
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