Sabbatarianism is fast on the decline.  The Sabbatarians are still noisy and determined enough to keep the majority of our public libraries, picture galleries, etc., closed on Sunday, but this is more from public indifference on the subject than from any general feeling that they ought to be shut.  This becomes evident from a visit to the suburbs on a fine Sunday.  All the world and his wife in private carriages and buggies, carts and omnibuses, even on Shanks’s pony, come away for an airing; and if the weather only allows of it, there are many of these holiday-makers who make a day of it, leaving their homes early in the morning, with but a few who return to evening service.

On the other hand, the Sunday is soberly kept.  In the less strict families music is allowed, but never cards or games of any kind.  The man who proposed such a thing in Adelaide would be anathema maranatha.  The general feeling, is, that the Sunday was made too wearisome in England to be supportable in a common-sense community; and Sabbatarianism is gradually losing ground day by day, as fast as the keeping up of appearances will allow.  There was a great outcry on one occasion because the Governor of Victoria travelled on a Sunday; but this was rather because there is a general feeling that unnecessary labour should as far as possible be avoided on a Sunday, than from Sabbatarianism in the ordinary sense of the word.

Morality has so long been connected with religion that it is difficult to treat of the one without more or less trenching upon the province of the other.  But there still remains something to be said on this score.  The commandments which are most freely broken in Australia, are par excellence the third, and then the sixth, in its minor sense of crimes of violence in general.  Young Australia makes a specialty of swearing.  High and low, rich and poor, indulge themselves in bad language luxuriantly; but it is amongst the rising generation that it reaches its acme.  The lower-class colonial swears as naturally as he talks.  He doesn’t mean anything by it in particular; nor is it really an evil outward and visible sign of the spiritual grace within him.  On the prevalence of larrikinism I wrote at length in a former epistle.

Drunkenness comes next on our list of vices.  That Australians as a nation are more drunken than Englishmen, I do not believe to be the fact; but what is undeniable is, that there is a great deal of drunkenness amongst those who may claim to be considered the upper classes here.  An English gentleman of the present day, whatever his other sins may be, does not get drunk, because it is ‘bad form,’ if for no better reason.  If in Australia we were to exclude as ‘outsiders’ all the leading colonists who are in the habit of intoxicating themselves—­to say nothing of the chance customers—­’society’ would dwindle down to nearly two-thirds its present size.  But there has been a very appreciable improvement in this respect during the last half-dozen years, and the tone of public feeling on the subject is gradually approximating to that of English society.  The old colonists are not of course expected to change their habits in their old age, but with the young generation there is less tippling, and port, sherry, and spirits are being replaced by claret.