We cannot tell, we can only speculate as to what another fifty—forty—thirty years will actually bring forth.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all go together. The necessities of life are cheap here, wonderfully cheap; a man can get a dinner here for sixpence that he could not get in England for twice or thrice the amount. "There are not," says the Australasian Schoolmaster, the organ of the State Schools, "there are not many under-fed children in the Australian [as there are in the English] schools." But the luxuries of life (and let us remember that what we call the luxuries of life are, after all, necessities; they are the things which go to make up our civilization, the things which make us feel that there is a greater pleasure in life than sitting under your vine and your fig-tree, whatever Mr. George may have to say to the contrary)—the luxuries of life, I say, are dear here, very dear, owing to, what I must be permitted to call, an exorbitant tariff, and, consequently, the money that would be spent in fostering a higher ideal of life, in preparing the way for a national higher education, is spent on these luxuries, and the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners, have to suffer for it. Here is your Mr. Marcus Clarke, for instance, talking grimly, not to say bitterly, of "the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct," of his "astonishment that such work" as Gordon's "was ever produced here." He is astonished, you see, that the claims of intellect and knowledge, and of beauty and manners are enough satisfied in this city to produce a talent of this sort; he is astonished, because he does not see that there is an element in this city which, in its way, is making for at any rate the intellect and knowledge—an element which is a product, not of England but of Australia; a general sense of movement, of progress, of conscious power.
Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all, I say, go together; but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last. Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards, not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well said, by evolution not by revolution. "Our chief, our gravest want in this country at present," says Arnold, "our unum necessarium, is a middle-class, homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools, and on the first plane." How true is this of Australia too, of Melbourne! There are State schools for the lower-class, but what is there for the great upper educated
