All this tends, no doubt, to an ugly, offhand manner, a disregard of the claims of mere intellectual superiority and spiritual beauty, and a crudity of outlook. Opinions formed by the young on those of more mature and well-informed people than themselves, and handed down to them mellow with age and honour, tend without doubt to a greater refinement, but hardly, after all, to a greater vitality. Gradually I am growing to believe that to form even erroneous opinions of one’s own is better in the end for one’s character than to take them obediently like pap from a spoon; and the Australian child, gay and light-hearted, quick in resource, independent and self-assertive, is certainly more suited to the needs of the young country in which its lines have been cast than the more “set” product of the English nursery. “We” do this or that, says the Australian child, reckoning itself as part of a double commonwealth of home and State. “Mummy and me, we are the boss of this place,” I once heard a young man of five—who kept house with his widowed mother—declare, no trace of arrogance in his voice, simply making the assertion. “I think _we_ had better marry again,” he remarked once, deeply concerned over the fact of his mother having to go out to work at one time when she was ill, and—even to his childish eye—manifestly unfit. Somehow, in spite of all their crudeness, their irrepressible larkiness, and their precocious love-affairs, there is something essentially sound and wholesome at the bottom of the Australian youth, omitting, of course, the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom which are much the same everywhere. Certainly, the boys, if they pass safely through the almost inevitable trip West and attendant gold-fever, make most excellent husbands, steady-going, hard-working, and considerate; while the girls settle down into good wives and devoted—often too devoted—mothers. In Australia the child’s future is generally very carefully considered, and the better class of parents will make immense sacrifices to fit it for some definite trade or profession. I believe a very large percentage of the girls marry; the amount of marriages in Victoria in 1908 being the largest total ever recorded—a sign apparently of prosperity, for between 1891 and 1894, which was a period of commercial depression, the number of marriages fell 20 per cent.—5,650 more persons having been married, allowing for the increase in population, in the last five years than between 1899 and 1903, despite universal suffrage. Naturally, though, now that there are so many more women than men in Victoria, the girls’ chances are fewer than in the old days, when very much the reverse was the case, yet, in spite of all the talk here, as elsewhere, of the hopeless superfluity of women, there, somehow, seems to be a sweetheart for every girl.