During the first week I was in Melbourne I came across a notice in the daily paper among the police-court news, stating that “Percy So-and-So, aged two years and four months,” had been “arrested on the charge of being a neglected child.”

“What a brutal country!” I thought. “Can it be possible that any human being can be found so hard-hearted and inhuman as to condemn a helpless child to any form of punishment, because by some tragic fate it has missed both a mother’s love and a father’s care?” Globe-trotters get all sorts of Adelphi-like impressions such as this, and then return home to rave in print about the barbarities and inefficiencies of other countries. Luckily for the correction of my ideas, however, I was to spend more than eight years in learning to understand this particular country a little better.

Very soon I began to realize that the most fortunate thing that can possibly happen to a child whose parents, or other guardians, persistently neglect or ill-treat it, is that it shall be thus summonsed; for then the State steps in in the place of its natural protector, and provides a decent home for it, food, clothing, and later on employment. In 1908 there were in Victoria 5,477 such wards of the State, and in all truth, however, the Government of Victoria may have been criticized for its management of other affairs, nothing—absolutely nothing—but good can be said of it in its position as foster-parent to this immense family. The 5477 children of whom I speak include 3,711 boarded out, 710 placed under supervision with friends, 748 maintaining themselves in service or apprenticeship, 306 in institutions or hospitals, and 2 visiting relations! By which it will be seen that a relation in Australia is no more overflowing with the milk of human kindness than in any other country. Among the newly-made wards of the State in 1908—numbering in all 1,240—the fathers were held to be blameable in 457 cases, and the mothers in 57; many of the heroic army of char-ladies being, I suspect, among the 457 who struggle bravely to support their offsprings unaided. There were 677 cases in which parents were held to be blameless; in some the family was too large for the father to adequately support all his children, while in others the father was dead, or an invalid, or in a lunatic asylum.

When the father is dead or an invalid, or has forsaken his wife, and the mother is known to be a hardworking, respectable woman, and yet unable to wholly maintain her family, then some—or all—of her children are made wards of the State, and boarded out to their own mother, who receives five shillings a week for their support; and in addition the help and advice of the State in all matters relating to their welfare: help that continues during the time that it is most particularly needed, which is when the youngsters have finished their schooling, and are ready to be put out into the world, with the need of a firmer hand than their mother over them.

If the children are committed to the care of private people, or institutions, these have to be approved of by the Governor in Council, five shillings a week being paid for each child boarded out to private people; unless it should be that they are voluntarily adopted, which is very often the case. I have not the faintest idea how many children are yearly adopted from hospitals and other institutions in Melbourne, but, judging by the number of cases I myself have come across, I should imagine it to be very large. In some ways people seem more humane, more primitive in Victoria than in England; certainly they are less easily reconciled to a childless home. They do not have large families, but if they have no child at all it is very common indeed for them to adopt one. Certainly I never personally knew anyone of wealth and good position in England to adopt a nameless child; but in Victoria I can bring to mind several cases in which this has been done, and the utmost care and love lavished upon it, while it never for one moment hears a single word that can cause it to doubt that the father and mother, of whose love it is so sure, are its own.

Over the little boarded-out baby the supervision is most especially strict. The whole administration of the Infant Life Protection Act, which was passed in 1890, and amended in 1907, has lately been taken out of the hands of the police, and put under the care of the Department for Neglected Children, to whom power is given to establish maternity homes and infant asylums. Any person who boards an infant must be registered; male or female inspectors must be permitted free access to the house, and allowed to examine the children, and give any necessary advice or directions, while no one is allowed to board out a child without first applying to the secretary of the Department, stating what amount he or she is prepared to pay weekly for its maintenance, no baby less than twelve months old being allowed to be boarded out under ten shillings a week, and all payments having to be made through the secretary. If these payments fall into arrears for four weeks the child becomes a ward of the State, while a penalty of £100, with or without imprisonment, is incurred for receiving or making payment for any infant contrary to the regulations of the Act, while it further provides that no illegitimate child—or boarded-out child—under the age of five years, who has died in such registered home, may be buried without a certificate from a coroner, justice, or member of the police-force.

That the need for such reform was pressing is shown by the vital statistics of the State for 1908; the number of illegitimate births being 1,790, and the deaths of these children under one year of age 354, the proportion of deaths among illegitimate children being between two and three times as great as that among children born in wedlock.

There are several foundling hospitals and rescue homes for women in Melbourne, but of these I am intimate with the working of but one—which for sheer humanity and complete realization of the claims of motherhood, apart from any other consideration, beats everything of the sort that I ever came across—and this is the Infant Asylum in Berry Street.

A girl who has got into trouble may apply at this asylum six or seven months before her hour of trial has come. She is taken in, fed and clothed, and—most merciful of all—given work to do, nobody, excepting the committee and matron, ever knowing her surname. When her time comes she goes to the Women’s Hospital for her confinement; and after that is over returns to the Home, to help in the general work, and to nurse and care for her own child. The value of this is scarcely to be estimated. The poor little mite is unfortunate enough as it is in possessing but one palpable parent, and being born under the stigma that—even in so free a country as Australia—is still attached to the completely innocent. If it is then taken from its mother and put straight into a foundling hospital, that mother’s whole memory of it will be so mingled with a nightmare of horror, and pain, and shame, that all she wishes for is to be able to forget its very existence; and so the poor mite is doubly orphaned. But I defy any mother—however reluctant—if she has but a spark of good in her, to suckle her child for a year or more, and not only feel bound to it by both love and duty, but capable of starting life again none the worse, and in many cases much the better—because more completely a woman—on account of its existence.

When the mother leaves the asylum, where she may stay for as long as two years, she is found a situation, and expected to contribute a percentage of her wages to the support of the baby who remains in the Home; unless, as is very often the case, she is allowed to have it with her; many people being quite willing—particularly in up-country districts where servants are scarce—to take a woman with a child, who as often as not becomes the pet of the entire household.

I have often seen mothers on Sundays at the Victoria Infant Asylum, who have called on their day out to see and have a romp with their children, who are all the dearer to them from the fact of the many small self-denials which they must practise to contribute to their support. To use the adjective “lost” or “fallen” to these women would be sheer nonsense. Personally I think they are infinitely and incomparably more moral than wives who sell their birthright by deliberately refusing the responsibilities of motherhood; while between them and the men whose name the children would have borne—had they entered the world with all honour and circumstance—there is no possible comparison, while it is due to the asylum where, in their blind terror, they first took refuge that these mothers have gained courage to stand upright, and face life as self-respecting women once more.

I feel I cannot write too strongly about this; I feel very strongly about it, and for the women on whom all the burden alone presses. Mr. Foster Fraser speaks of the number of illegitimate children in Australia. He says nothing at all of all the splendid measures that are being taken to combat this great source of misery, nor the facilities which are afforded, if marriage takes place later than it should do, for legitimizing children. Nor, though he compares the dairy output of Denmark and Australia, to the great disadvantage of the latter, does he extend the same comparison to a more vital matter, to wit, the percentage of illegitimate births—at which he is apparently so horrified—which is in Victoria 5.8, and in the Commonwealth 6.2, against 10.1 in Denmark; while in Sweden, another Northern country, it rises to 12.3. Even in Puritanical Scotland this percentage is 6.5, while it seems to me that for a country where for many months of the year the smaller houses and cottages have by evening become almost stifling; where the only possible relief for young people, who have no gardens of their own, is to be found either in the streets or public gardens, or on the easily reached sea-beaches, that the percentage is wonderfully moderate, that of Portugal, where the climatic conditions are much the same—though the young women are allowed far less of the liberty which I have heard so condemned in speaking of Australian life—being 11.4.

Education in Victoria is both free and compulsory, and yet the position of the State, or public schools is perfectly different from that of the Council schools at home. Once I was living in a little West Country town in England where the Rector, by sheer force of brains, had raised himself from a Board school to the position which he held. He was a most cultivated and charming man, but the matter of his education was never forgotten. Whenever he did anything his parishioners did not approve of—as even an archangel must have done, certainly he would have been no archangel if he had not—there was a shrugging of shoulders, and the inevitable remark: “Well, what can you expect from a man that’s been at a Board school?”In Australia the fact of a boy being educated at a State school tells against him no whit unless it be among the very few rich people who like to consider themselves exclusive, idle people, of no consequence whatever in any affair of moment. Many families who are but moderately well off send their boys to the State schools while they are quite young, as at home they would send them to a Preparatory. When they reach the age of thirteen or fourteen they then enter them at one of the big schools corresponding to the lesser public schools at home, such as Wellington, Clifton, or Cheltenham. In Melbourne the principal among these schools are the Church of England Grammar School, the Presbyterian College—a beautiful grey stone building, covered in the autumn with a mantle of crimson creeper, and presenting more the appearance of a dignified old English dwelling-house than any building I have ever seen in Victoria—and the Scots College.

There is nothing higher than these—or need be, for the type of boy they produce, and the education both mental and physical, that they supply is most admirable. If an English Duke settled in Melbourne and wanted to send his son to school, it is between these three that he would have to choose; where his son’s class-mate might be a boy who had received his primary education in a State school, absolutely no slur whatever being cast on him on that account. Boys in England are the most arrant snobs. They are inoculated with it from the cradle. They must not play with the coachman’s children because they are common; they must not—if they belong to what is known as “the county”—play with the local lawyer’s boys or the grammar-school boys because they are “cads,” which reminds me of a fine definition of the two words “cad” and “snob”: “cads are the people we won’t know, and snobs are the people who won’t know us.” I find very little, if any, tendency of this sort in the Australian boy. A fellow is good at games or a “rotter,” and who his father and mother are, and whether he was or was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, does not concern his companions in the very least. It is not that the boys are any better or any worse than elsewhere; it is simply that they have not heard all the talk about position that is constantly ringing in the ears of an English lad. When I took my small boy home there was so much objection made to him playing with what were called “common children” that I was forced to try to explain to him the difference between the classes, with the effect that his whole ideas of right and wrong became hopelessly muddled; the discussion, as I remember it, running somewhat like this:

“But why mayn’t I play with them, mummy? They are good boys.”

“Yes, dear, but they are not gentlemen.”

“Why, what have they done?”“Oh, they have done nothing.”

“Well, is it their daddies or their mammies have been naughty?”

“No, dear; they are quite good. It’s only that they are not in the same position that you are.”

“Is it because they are poor that you don’t like them? ’cause we are poor too.” And so on, till the only way out of the difficulty—the true invidiousness of which had, by years of absence, grown to seem as completely mysterious to me as it did to him—lay in imposing upon him the meaningless command to “do as you are told, and ask no questions.”

Among the State schools in Victoria there are bursaries and scholarships available for the secondary schools and universities; while for any boy to climb from the position of a State school pupil into that of Prime Minister is simply a matter of capability and grit.

Continuation schools have been established in Melbourne, Ballarat, and Bendigo for the purpose of giving a preliminary training to teachers, which must afterwards be followed by two years in the Melbourne Training College, when they are free to be appointed to sixth-class positions as State-school teachers, at an annual salary of about £120 for the men teachers and £100 for the women.

These positions are often by no means the tame affairs that they are in England, particularly to the city-born boy or girl. Lately there has been much agitation about the question of decent dwelling-places for State-school teachers in country districts, some of the statements made in the daily papers by these teachers, about two years ago, being little short of revolting. Often the young teacher boards out with some neighbouring “cocky” farmer and his wife, and, at the best, this may be better than sharing a wooden shanty with flies and white ants, where water is always scarce, and company of any sort an impossibility. But at the worst—and the worst of these “cocky” farmers’ homes are sordid beyond any word—it may prove pretty well unendurable, particularly to a young creature who has grown accustomed to the bustle and gaiety of college life; while the mental picture that rises to my mind of the sort of meal set out before a nerve-racked and wearied teacher in some such place, with the sickening slough of half-melted salt butter, the black, drawn tea, the indecent slab of boiled beef—the whole dotted with flies as thickly as a cake with currants—justifies completely the desperate assertion made to me by one delicately pretty young school-marm “I’d marry any man in the world who had a refrigerator.”

But this is the darker side of the picture, though in any case the life of a teacher in a back-block school is one of “alarms and excursions” till time and experience have mellowed it. Still, in all but the loneliest places there are certainly compensations. People are hospitable and friendly; distances are ignored; there is generally someone to lend a horse to the teacher, particularly if she be a girl and a good sort, and someone to teach her to ride, too. There are dances and picnics, moonlight picnics being rather a speciality in Australia, and plenty of wholesome fun. People will work incredibly hard on their farms up in the back blocks, particularly if they go in for dairying; but with all this they have a most extraordinary faculty for enjoying themselves, and there is many a morning when the young school teacher will ride home with an admiring escort none too early to start morning school, after dancing gaily all night. Australia is a good place to be young in, particularly when riding through the Bush in the early dawn; the clear air sweet with the scent which the dew brings out from the young gum-leaves and sweet briar; a good horse under you—and “possibilities” of divers sorts riding by your side; while the Bush dances, where there are as often as not six men to every girl—the men dancing together when they can get no better partners—would be a revelation to any English girl used to balls at home, where, though all the arrangements are far more elaborate, partners are few, and it is the men, and not the girls, who can pick and choose.

In some country places the dwellings are so scattered that the question of schooling becomes a very difficult one. In thinly-populated districts, if an attendance of twenty children can be secured, a full-time school is established; under this number the part-time system is arranged for, one teacher attending at two different schools on alternate days. In other scattered districts payment is made to assist parents in conveying their children to school; in any case a great many ride, and it is no uncommon sight to see three or four youngsters astride upon a sturdy pony, with their school-bags slung over their backs. Often when the attendance is not sufficient to warrant the Educational Department in erecting a school-house, the parents will club together to build a room, at a very small cost, as they provide the labour themselves; while the importance which is generally attached to education is proved by the fact that there are some 600 State schools in Victoria, with an attendance of between twelve and twenty pupils only. In still more sparsely populated districts a teacher goes from house to house within a certain radius, giving a lesson, setting tasks, and correcting them at his next visit; while in New South Wales travelling schools have been established, where the teacher moves about, gipsy-like, with a van, which is at once his home and school, fitted with blackboards and books and all the impedimenta necessary for housekeeping—far less, it must be owned, than would be required by an English man or woman of the same class, for they all seem, somehow, to travel lighter out here, and both the personal and domestic machinery of life is far less complicated:—tea, flour for a damper, sugar, matches, a blanket, a waterproof sheet, and a billy-can, and there is little to fear save thirst—and incidentally bull-dog ants. In Melbourne one may, with a settled income at one’s back, live as complicated and luxurious a life as is possible in any other city. But, on the other hand, when one has learnt the two great lessons of how to do without and how to put up with, one can get more fun for less money here than in any other country that I know of. The rural school-teachers may—and probably do—have a much rougher time than they would in England, but beyond a doubt they have a brighter and healthier; while their life is certainly far removed from the utter drabness which characterizes the existence of the ordinary middle-class man or woman at home.

Essentially Australia is, as I have said, a country for the young. The children are thoroughly well looked after, while as they attain to a larger growth they look after themselves in a way that sometimes makes one squirm. One of the first things that I noticed when I landed was that, in the hotels and coffee-palaces, the girls walked into the dining-room in front of their mothers. They took up the menu-card, examined it, and made their choice before handing it on to their meek parent. For the mothers are meek, there is no doubt about it—the fathers being generally too busy over their own affairs and the making of money for their families to count for much,—and I often look at them in wonder, trying to imagine the modern, breezy, self-assertive young woman of the present day ever being trained to such a perfection of self-obliteration by her daughter.

Partly, I believe, this supremacy is owing to the fact that there seems no stationary class. The people are always going up or down in the social scale. Those people who are rich, and in a way influential, to-day, are the people who served in the shops, dug the gardens, or washed the clothes of those who were rich yesterday; while the whole of the populace seems to slip about from one position to another like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. A great many of the people one sees in public places are “jumped up.” They had no chance of any education when they were young: their hands have been roughed and their shoulders bowed with toil during their youth and early middle age. Education—the mere getting of a certain form of stereotyped knowledge—riches, and what is known as “smartness,” are worshipped by the young—particularly those of the towns—in Australia. They are not ashamed of their parents because they are what might be called “common”; they are simply impatient with them because they are slower in their old-fashioned methods, and not so “smart,” so quick in the up-take, as themselves. In the main I think the children are very loyal to their parents. The lack of courtesy, of patience, and consideration is all fully en Évidence, but I have never heard the sullen or bitter complaints against the tyranny and misunderstanding of fathers and mothers in Australia that I have heard in England. Apparently—and actually—the young people go their own way, and take the lead and tender their advice on every matter with a freedom unknown to even the most modern youth in the Old Country; but at the back of it all there is a real sense of comradeship.

In a great number of cases the Australian mother has had a bitterly hard time in her youth, and yet there has lingered in her nature something eternally young that enables her to enter with the greatest zest into her daughter’s enjoyment, by which she seems, indeed, to attain herself to a vicarious youth. You do not hear so many references to “the good old days” as in older countries, or the assertion, “I didn’t go to dances when I was young; why should you?” “I didn’t have any pleasure or amusement; why should you expect it?” etc., etc. On the other hand, you frequently hear the assertion, “One is only young once, and I am determined my children should have a gayer time, a better education, better clothes, and a better chance than ever I had.” It all goes too far, of course, and the children get an inflated idea of their own importance, as I once heard a Melbourne woman say: “The Australian baby begins to suffer from a swelled head at two months.” There is very little of parental discipline or of the machine-like regularity of nursery life—the machine-like servants stolidly going their inevitable round of daily duties; the machine-like, precisely punctual meals; the awful ceremony of the trivial daily round that bulwarks one’s earliest days at home.

In any but the largest households a proper nursery is unknown; in any case the youngsters have most of their meals with the grown-ups. Besides, domestic affairs are usually in the same kaleidoscopic condition as everything else. The servants leave en bloc before the Cup, or because some important ceremony in another State holds out to them the chance of larger wages as waitresses or cooks. Then the mother turns to and does the cooking; and the father brings back cold meats and salad-stuffs from the city, and helps wash up the dishes in the evenings, unless there are visitors to supper—and nothing of any sort ever stops the constant entertaining that goes on—when they are expected to do their share; the children run the errands, and dust, and sweep, and enjoy themselves thoroughly; adjourning with their parents, in a mass, to a restaurant for meals when they all get tired of the work, till a fresh domestic staff is procured.The entire household is on a more intimate footing than at home. The children know all about Bridget’s young man, and will give her a hand with the dishes on any one of her many days out; or, when her temper is good, wander at their own sweet will in and out of the kitchen, with incessant demands for what is known as “a piece”—a liberal slice of bread, butter, and jam.

The Australian—both child and adult—devours enormous quantities of jam, particularly up in the back blocks, where butter is almost an unknown luxury; so much so that the cattle-men, shearers, and shepherds get their internal machinery completely ruined in time by the quantity of inferior boiled sugar and fruit that they consume, and which they have inelegantly christened “rot-gut.” But, still, one cannot live on boiled beef and damper alone, and as tomato sauce and jam are the cheapest relishes obtainable, every camping-place and hut is littered round with an inevitable medley of sauce-bottles and tins.

Everyone loves “lollies”—as they are called out here, the word “sweets” only being applied to what we generally call “puddings,”—and Melbourne and Sydney are the only towns where I have ever seen grown-up people gathered in absorbed and wistful groups round the windows of the confectioners’ shops, both men and women, discussing the good things on show there as engrossedly as they would stocks and shares—or hats; this characteristic being so marked that I was actually told to observe it by the captain of the ship I travelled out on, who himself hailed from “the land o’ cakes,” while a young man here very rarely goes to call on a girl without an offering of a box of lollies, apparently not being so overweighted with a sense of his own sufficiency as he is at home.

It is extraordinarily difficult to rid oneself of old ideas that one has imbibed in one’s bread-and-milk days: to lose that inherent English faculty of taking “short views,” which Sydney Smith recommends as a virtue, and look forward sufficiently far to realize what does really matter; what is, and what is not, of lasting importance.

At the best the independence of the Australian child—or “kid,” as it is inevitably called—is piquant and rather charming; at the worst it is intensely irritating. Still, unless it resolves into rudeness, which in a child or adult is always repulsive, the idea of the deference due to age, merely as age, is after all only the result of our own idea of our own self-importance. If there ever was a youth that wanted to see “the wheels go round” it is the Australian youth, who must know the why and wherefore of everything. There must be a distinct reason, beyond mere years, to persuade him to show any deference to anybody, and some reason, beyond that of youth, for humility on his own side. The man who has kicked the greatest number of goals that year at football, or made the most runs at cricket, or ridden the Cup winner; who is palpably successful in business or pleasure—that they can understand, but little else; he is “a bit of all right,” but the merely fictitious value of age they “have no time for,” as they would say.

All this tends, no doubt, to an ugly, offhand manner, a disregard of the claims of mere intellectual superiority and spiritual beauty, and a crudity of outlook. Opinions formed by the young on those of more mature and well-informed people than themselves, and handed down to them mellow with age and honour, tend without doubt to a greater refinement, but hardly, after all, to a greater vitality. Gradually I am growing to believe that to form even erroneous opinions of one’s own is better in the end for one’s character than to take them obediently like pap from a spoon; and the Australian child, gay and light-hearted, quick in resource, independent and self-assertive, is certainly more suited to the needs of the young country in which its lines have been cast than the more “set” product of the English nursery. “We” do this or that, says the Australian child, reckoning itself as part of a double commonwealth of home and State.

“Mummy and me, we are the boss of this place,” I once heard a young man of five—who kept house with his widowed mother—declare, no trace of arrogance in his voice, simply making the assertion. “I think we had better marry again,” he remarked once, deeply concerned over the fact of his mother having to go out to work at one time when she was ill, and—even to his childish eye—manifestly unfit.

Somehow, in spite of all their crudeness, their irrepressible larkiness, and their precocious love-affairs, there is something essentially sound and wholesome at the bottom of the Australian youth, omitting, of course, the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom which are much the same everywhere. Certainly, the boys, if they pass safely through the almost inevitable trip West and attendant gold-fever, make most excellent husbands, steady-going, hard-working, and considerate; while the girls settle down into good wives and devoted—often too devoted—mothers.

In Australia the child’s future is generally very carefully considered, and the better class of parents will make immense sacrifices to fit it for some definite trade or profession. I believe a very large percentage of the girls marry; the amount of marriages in Victoria in 1908 being the largest total ever recorded—a sign apparently of prosperity, for between 1891 and 1894, which was a period of commercial depression, the number of marriages fell 20 per cent.—5,650 more persons having been married, allowing for the increase in population, in the last five years than between 1899 and 1903, despite universal suffrage. Naturally, though, now that there are so many more women than men in Victoria, the girls’ chances are fewer than in the old days, when very much the reverse was the case, yet, in spite of all the talk here, as elsewhere, of the hopeless superfluity of women, there, somehow, seems to be a sweetheart for every girl.

Still marriage is not regarded as a profession—though, on the whole, the girls are better equipped for it than at home, knowing far more of the value of money, cooking, and general house-work—and the daughters equally with the sons are prepared for some other and more certain mode of life. Men and women can be trained in Melbourne for almost any profession for which they show a bent, though there is no doubt that a year or so in England, Germany, or France is of immense advantage to them, particularly in medicine.

One would imagine that in a country still so largely in the making there would be ample room for any engineers, both electrical and mechanical, that it could produce, and ample facilities for training them. But people complain that their sons can reach a certain point in their engineering training, and find no one to carry them on any further; while even for those who are most thoroughly trained and capable the openings are very few, and a number of the most promising young Australian engineers are yearly passing out of this country to America.

There is little doubt that very soon, in all other professions as well as that of engineering, the scant population will mean a serious lack of employment for all the upper classes. The young doctors and dentists want patients; the architects want houses to build and towns to plan; the surveyors and engineers want new country opened, new railways, new mines; lawyers and land agents want clients. It is always the same; the educated few must depend for their living on the more or less uneducated masses, the people engaged in that class of labour for which numbers are required. A township with a bank-manager and clerk, doctor, parson, and lawyer would fare badly if it could show only an equal number of factory hands, labourers, or masons. And yet this is what education and prosperity seem likely to do for us, a tendency which the present influx of immigrants is too small to counteract. There must be more people to doctor, to bank for, to legislate for, and to teach, in proportion to the number of highly-educated young men and women who are now being prepared at school and college for professional life or clerical duties.

It seems to me that too many people have made money in Victoria; that too many have risen from the ranks of the manual labourers, with sons and daughters whom they naturally wish should go even one step higher than themselves.

There was an old dairyman, I once knew, not far from Melbourne, who kept a dozen or so cows, milked them himself with the help of a boy, tended them himself, and drove his own carts to town. He was a peasant to the backbone—and that’s no bad thing to be, better by far than any half and half—a delightfully genial old son of the soil, while his wife, who had probably never been in bed later than six any morning during her entire life—unless she was ill—and would not have dreamt of expecting the duties of her tiny household to be done by anyone but herself—washing, cooking, sweeping, scrubbing, making, and mending from dawn to dark—was just the same homely sort of old body as her husband. Still the boy who helped the old man with the cows was not theirs, but a mere, ever-changing hireling. Humble and contented as the old couple were, they yet cherished a wider ambition for their son, who had in truth nobly fulfilled their expectations; passing from the State school on to college; training for a doctor; walking the hospitals; passing all his examinations with flying colours; and, finally, with the old man’s help—help that had been made possible only by infinite never-ending toil—bought a country practice, and took his place among the professional classes.

A thing like this is very fine. It stirs one’s pulse, and warms one’s heart even to think of the self-denial of those two dear old people, and the gallant success of the boy. But there is another side to the question, a prosaic, matter-of-fact side. If there had been ten sons, instead of one, there would have been no money to spare for extra education; there would have been less care possible, less thought, less food for every individual member of the family, and therefore less chance of development. The ten sons would have become milkmen, dairy-hands, labourers, or artisans—and a good doctor have been lost to the State. But still, which is the most needed? Now when the vast empty spaces of the Continent are crying out for population and subsequent cultivation? The small families, which are the almost inevitable rule among the better sort of people—the weak-minded and undesirable breed as freely here as elsewhere—may be for the good of the individual, but they are certainly not good for the State, where quantity is required more than quality—apart from that of good sound bodies—and where there is already almost too much “cleverness.” The art, the literature, the general quickness of comprehension, the business methods, they are all clever—they are not profound or intellectual; neither are they plodding. They are the outcome indeed, for the most part, of the adored only child, whose every word and action is a miracle. Australia needs larger individual families, producing a deeper subsoil of hard-working people, without too many ideals, while as the mother of a nation it needs to open its arms, to enlarge its sympathies, and to get rid, once for all, of that “precious only child in the world” idea by which it seems each year to grow more completely engrossed—I mean the “Australia for the Australians” ideal.