The best workman when he chooses, and the most difficult to get hold of, is the thoroughbred colonial.  Being able to read and write does not, however, keep him from being as brutal as Coupeau, and, except from a muscular point of view, he is often by no means a promising specimen of colonization.  It is from this section of the community that the ‘larrikins,’ as they are called, are recruited, roughs of the worst description, insulting and often robbing people in Melbourne itself, and moving about in gangs with whose united force the police is powerless to cope.  Sometimes they break into hotels and have ‘free drinks’ all round, maltreating the landlord if he protests.  In a younger stage they content themselves with frightening helpless women, and kicking every Chinaman they meet.  On all sides it is acknowledged that the larrikin element is daily increasing, and has already reached, especially in Melbourne, proportions which make it threaten to amount to a social clanger within a few years.  Of late their outbreaks have not been confined to night-work, but take place in open daylight, coram populo et police.  No one exactly knows how to meet the difficulty, and What shall we do with our larrikins?’ is likely to replace the former popular cry of ’What shall we do with our boys?’ to which some ingenious person furnished the obvious answer, ‘Marry them to our girls.’  Corporal punishment for corporal offences is in my opinion and that of most of the serious portion of the community, the only remedy which is likely also to act as a preventive; but however desirable it may be acknowledged to be, there is a difficulty in bringing it into use in communities whose sympathies are so essentially democratic as those of Victoria and New South Wales—­for in Adelaide the police has still the upper hand.  The votes of these very larrikins turn the scale at elections.  Their kith and kin form a majority of the population, and therefore of the electorate.  However much a member of Parliament or a Minister may recognise the necessity of meeting a social danger, he can hardly afford to do it at the expense of his seat.

At the time of the Kelly trial practical demonstration of the latent sympathy with crime in Melbourne was afforded.  Thousands of persons, headed by the Chairman of Committees of the House of Assembly, actually agitated for the reprieve of the most notorious, if not the greatest, criminal in the annals of Australia, a man whose murders were not to be counted on the fingers; and all this because for over two years he had set the police at defiance, and after a life of murder and rapine had, shown the courage of despair when his only choice was between being shot by a policeman or hung on the gallows.  In many respects, as, I have elsewhere intimated, our free political system makes the social outlook here far more promising than in Europe; but larrikinism is a peculiar danger already well above the horizon, against which we seem powerless to deal.  Some set it down to the absence of religious teaching in the State schools, but its real point and origin seems rather to lie in the absence of parental authority at home and the unpopularity of the old proverb:  ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’