Essentially Australia is, as I have said, a country for the young. The children are thoroughly well looked after, while as they attain to a larger growth they look after themselves in a way that sometimes makes one squirm. One of the first things that I noticed when I landed was that, in the hotels and coffee-palaces, the girls walked into the dining-room in front of their mothers. They took up the menu-card, examined it, and made their choice before handing it on to their meek parent. For the mothers are meek, there is no doubt about it—the fathers being generally too busy over their own affairs and the making of money for their families to count for much,—and I often look at them in wonder, trying to imagine the modern, breezy, self-assertive young woman of the present day ever being trained to such a perfection of self-obliteration by her daughter. Partly, I believe, this supremacy is owing to the fact that there seems no stationary class. The people are always going up or down in the social scale. Those people who are rich, and in a way influential, to-day, are the people who served in the shops, dug the gardens, or washed the clothes of those who were rich yesterday; while the whole of the populace seems to slip about from one position to another like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. A great many of the people one sees in public places are “jumped up.” They had no chance of any education when they were young: their hands have been roughed and their shoulders bowed with toil during their youth and early middle age. Education—the mere getting of a certain form of stereotyped knowledge—riches, and what is known as “smartness,” are worshipped by the young—particularly those of the towns—in Australia. They are not ashamed of their parents because they are what might be called “common”; they are simply impatient with them because they are slower in their old-fashioned methods, and not so “smart,” so quick in the up-take, as themselves. In the main I think the children are very loyal to their parents. The lack of courtesy, of patience, and consideration is all fully _en évidence_, but I have never heard the sullen or bitter complaints against the tyranny and misunderstanding of fathers and mothers in Australia that I have heard in England. Apparently—and actually—the young people go their own way, and take the lead and tender their advice on every matter with a freedom unknown to even the most modern youth in the Old Country; but at the back of it all there is a real sense of comradeship.