There is a great deal of truth in the old saying—­that it takes three generations to make a gentleman and there is no doubt but that the second is infinitely the worst of the three.  Shortly the country will pass through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social as we are passing through the political crisis, and obtain a modified aristocracy in the third generation, which in the fourth should become as profitable to the country as an aristocracy well can be.

At present the old squatter drinks and gambles; his son will drink less, gamble more—­though it was not a young man who recently lost L40,000 in a night’s sitting at a club in Melbourne—­and lead a wanton life; but he will probably have the sense to educate his children thoroughly, instead of taking them away from school at seventeen, as was done with himself; and the grandson will obtain some cultivated tastes which will make a fight for it with those he has inherited.  In the fourth generation there should be an aristocracy, with as much similarity of character and disposition to the existing English aristocracy as the different circumstances of the two countries will permit.

The life of a wealthy woman in Australia is ennuyeux to a degree.  If she is a lady by birth and education, she must necessarily feel that the advantages which wealth bestows are squandered upon such provincialism as she is perforce subjected to.  To reign in hell is, after all, a very low ideal, and one which can only be entertained by an inferior nature, so long as heaven remains within reach.  There are, of course, advantages in being rich even in Australia; but the wealthy lady will naturally draw comparisons between these and those which the same amount of money would procure for her in London or Paris.  She can import dresses from Worth’s, and carriages from Peters’, but she cannot choose them for herself; and if they should be really admirable, who is there to appreciate their superiority to the surrounding fashions?

‘How on earth am I to get on in Adelaide,’ said a musician of considerable merit to me, ’when, as you know, there is no one with whom I can provoke comparisons?’ The very superiority of the man was fatal to his success.  And so it is with the Australian lady of taste.  Nor does the misfortune stop there.  Unless she makes frequent visits to centres of taste, I will defy any woman to retain her appreciation of good taste.  Her own taste gets dulled by the want of means of comparison.  You will perhaps say that taste in her surroundings is not everything which wealth can bring to a woman.  But if you come to reflect for a moment, you will see that in the more comprehensive meaning of the phrase it is.  Dress is but one example of the surroundings which a woman covets.  I have chosen it because it is perhaps the commonest, though of course not by a long way the highest,