Of course one meets, as I did, just as charming people in Australia as you do anywhere else, but these are the exceptions. The American, as I found him, no matter what his rank in life, was a born gentleman, kindly and courteous, yet prompt and practical, and just as nice a fellow whether he was inviting you to a banquet or giving you a shave. Now, with all due deference to Miss Australia’s many physical and mental charms and her rapidly increasing stature, I venture to suggest that she would not be the worse for a few lessons in social deportment. At present she appears to be rather in danger of becoming the tomboy of the international nursery. The chief trouble with her seems to be that she is so desperately anxious not to appear servile that she forgets to be civil. One cause of this singular lack of manners in the conduct of every-day affairs may be found in the fact that the vast majority of parents—and particularly those belonging to the so-called working-class—consider that the end and aim of their children’s education should be the obtaining of “a good government billet.” The natural result is the creation of a huge army of officials who have never had any training in the social ways of the world, who know little or nothing of business in the wider sense of the term, and whose education compels them either to do everything according to official routine or to leave it undone. The fact is that Australia is beginning to suffer from too much government. It is the most over-governed commonwealth in the world. As every old Colonial knows, it is the interest of a large majority of the voters to have a governmental machine with as many wheels in it as possible. There is a curious likeness here between the middle- and lower-class Australian, if I may be pardoned for using such a heretical word as class in such a connection, and the Frenchman of the same social grade. To both the highest ideal of personal ambition is well-paid employment under government with a pension to follow; whence it comes that both these utterly dissimilar nations are cursed with an ever-increasing generation of office-seekers whose only object in life is to live as well as possible out of the taxes.