Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/127

and they certainly show democracy in a very favourable light. If, instead of this enormous expenditure on the education of the young, we saw these colonies, which are largely the outcome of a heterogeneous lower middle-class and working-class emigration, growing more and more careless as to the training of the coming generation, then we might give ear to the lamentations of the aristocratic Jeremiahs of our time. It may be that a good deal of this money is wasted, and that much of the education thus freely given by the State only tends to increase the terrible competition, in what I may term the "quill-driving" callings of modern civic life. But this is an evil that will work its own cure. In one of the best of General Gordon's recently published letters, he has a very pertinent remark about the necessity of imparting a knowledge of handicrafts at school, particularly to gentlemen's sons. It is very evident that those who are wise in the next generation will see that their children are taught a mechanical trade, in addition to what will then be the universal acquirement of the three R's—for it may be that a handicraft will be almost as essential to every citizen in the future, as the capacity of common speech, or the power of locomotion.