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AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

should attach the dishonour of subverting the laws of the Commonwealth. But in innumerable cases the result has been what the reformers wished—the settlement of the people on the land.

Take again the question of National Education. Here we see, throughout the entire group of colonies, the democratic or popular party determined, whatever the cost might be, that every child born in the territory should receive, free of cost to the parents, a sound elementary education. Nothing seems to have struck the young Princes, or rather their mentor, the Rev. John Dalton, so much as the lavish expenditure on public education in Australia.

"It really does come upon one with a shock of surprise to find how very small in England the total expenditure on Education is, after all. For England and Wales the whole cost of elementary education is only six and a half millions, and whereas in the United Kingdom the cost of education (science and art and all included) is 6s. a head, in many of our colonies it is 14s., and in some of the United States it is 19s.; in New South Wales it is 15s. per head of the population."—(The Cruise of the Bacchante, vol. i. p. 570.) These figures are near enough for all practical purposes of comparison,