VICTORIAN YOUTH
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.