Of drinking as apart from drunkenness I have already said enough.  The seventh commandment is one of those unpleasant subjects which one must deal with, and which one would yet prefer to leave alone.  Generally speaking, one may say, that while our upper and lower classes are, if anything, rather worse in their morals than in England, we make up for the deficiency by a decided superiority amongst the middle—­both upper-middle and lower-middle—­class.  Conversation is perhaps coarser here; but whatever may be the reality, the moral standard generally accepted is superior to that of London.  Such immorality as exists is necessarily of a coarser and more brutal type.  In Melbourne, especially, the social sin is very obtrusive.  Sydney has of late been acquiring an unenviable notoriety for capital offences, and it is not advisable for ladies to walk alone in the streets there at any time of the day.  On the other hand, in Adelaide no woman who does not give occasion for it need ever fear that she will be accosted.

Larrikinism is certainly a troublesome phase to deal with; but burglaries are exceedingly rare, and it may fairly be said, that life and property are more secure in the Australian capitals than in any European towns of the same size.  As in all large cities, the scum or dregs of the population gradually localizes itself, and thus becomes easier of control, even though it may increase in amount.  And here, Adelaide has an advantage in being seven miles distant from its seaport, which naturally retains a large portion of the noxious element.  Melbourne has two disadvantages, which tend to make it the sink of Australia—­firstly in its metropolitan character and central position, and secondly in the admission of a large number of bad characters at the time of the gold-diggings.  Sydney, of course, retains traces of the old convict element—­an element, however, which must be acknowledged to have contributed to the good as well as to the bad qualities which are peculiar to New South Wales.

EDUCATION.

That very profound saying about the victory of the German schoolmaster has not been without effect even in this distant land.  During the last decade education has been the question du jour here; not that we have studied it physiologically and psychologically and culture-logically, as you have been doing in England.  Theologies are a little beyond our ken, and we leave it to the old country to discover, by a harmonious combination of deductive and inductive teachings, what education really is.  Our educational crisis has been merely legislative and administrative; but it is no small transformation for us to have emerged from the chrysalis state of clerical and private-venture instruction into the full butterflydom of a free, compulsory and secular national system.  And that not before it was time.  Whatever may be the demerits of uniformity, State-interference, secularity, etc., etc., it does not leave room for the same incompetence in teaching and ignorance on the part of the learner, as frequently occurred in the old happy-go-lucky fashion of schooling.  Australian children have all now the chance of learning the three R’s according to the latest and most approved fashion, and if their parents choose they can also get a smattering of history, geography, and one or two other things into the bargain.