It is little wonder that, with wages like these, in a country where food is so cheap as in Victoria—Mr. Coghlan estimates that only 37.5 per cent. of the earnings of the people is spent in food and drink as against 42.2 in Great Britain and 49.1 in Germany—with a climate in which fires are seldom a real necessity, certainly not for more than three months in the year, where the means of transit, of change and amusement are cheap and inexpensive, that the Australian workman, when it is impressed on him that he must show a proper twentieth-century spirit of revolt, is—being by nature a peaceful and good-tempered person—rather puzzled to know where to begin; and this is in spite of the fact that more than twice as much meat is consumed annually per inhabitant in Australia than in England, and more than four times as much as in Germany, and that a meat diet is supposed to give rise to a passion for revolt, crime, murder, and rapine in the heart of any man. There is, I believe, only one vegetarian restaurant in Melbourne, and that is in the basement of a building in Collins Street, originally intended for a cellar. I would not like to say anything unkind about it or its habitués, but certainly they _do_ not look as if they had been grown there; while I certainly prefer the appearance and colouring of the people who—cheerfully and persistently in the face of all food faddists—still consume their three meat meals a day, though there is, of course, moderation in everything. There are no workhouses in Australia, and there is no Poor Law; on one side there is the State, and on the other benevolent asylums—the former instituting more or less spasmodic relief works in the time of any great depression; the latter helping lame dogs over stiles when needs be. But, except for the physically and mentally unfit, the Victorian does not need charity; there is nearly always work of some sort for the man who really desires it; while up-country the sun-downer, or _bona fide_ worker in search for a job, will find “tucker” for the asking at any farm or station. For the people who habitually refuse to work there are the prisons, to which a man or woman may be sent for “possessing no visible means of employment,” which is considered paramount to battening on their fellow-creatures in some fashion or other. Farm colonies for incompetents have long been thought of, and certainly they are a very necessary movement in the face of the large class of men who are willing and able to do a set task, but quite incapable of tackling any job on their own initiative.