-02 NEW SOUTH WALES. 



millions sterling annually on sucli matters as literature and art and 

 tlie drama, on private education as apart from tlie huge State expendi- 

 ture for tliis purpose, on public amusements, charities, and religion. 

 So far as the question of public education is concerned, it may be said 

 here that it is the object of the State to ensure that every child in the 

 land shall enjoy the advantage of sound primary instruction, and any- 

 thing above that standard is, as a general thing, paid for by those 

 who want it. Religion has no assistance from the State. But litera- 

 ture and art are subsidised by the establishment of free libraries, a 

 National Art Gallery, and a school of instruction, the expenditure on 

 which is not reckoned in the amount above quoted as spent by the 

 people themselves. 



The interests of sport have alwtays received active sympathy from 

 all classes. Beginning in the schools, the love of sport in its various 

 forms is carried through life, and through all classes. The Australian 

 race seems to have fully inherited the Anglo-Saxon characteristics in 

 this respect ; and perhaps for the future of the race it is well that 

 this should be so. During many months of the year our climate is 

 likely to prove relaxing, if not enervating, if active habits of life are 

 not formed to counteract it. In the country the value of the agricul- 

 tural, pastoral, and mining life led there supplies this in a sufficient 

 degree ; but in the towns and cities a tacit attempt is always going 

 on to engraft English habits of food, dress, and ordinary life on not 

 always suitable Australian circumstances. We eat the same meals and 

 wear the same clothes, as far as possible, as our cousins in England 

 do under far different conditions, and up to the present, in New South 

 Wales at all events^ very little progress towards adaptation in these 

 respects has been made in the sense illustrated by British residents at 

 Calcutta, or the West Indies, or Hongkong. But what we want in 

 adaptation is made up for to a large extent by our active habits of out- 

 door sport. Our races at Randwick are a national institution. Our 

 cricketers are as well known at Lords', or The Oval, as they are on the 

 Sydney Association Ground. Our rowers, like Trickett, Rush, Laycock, 

 Stanbury, Beach, and Searle, have won fame at home and abroad as the 

 world's champions. A bicycle tournament crowds the grounds with 

 tens of thousands of spectators, and we have lately seen a world's 

 champion go from our shores leaving a leaf or two of his laurels 

 behind him. Our people spend a million sterling on art and amuse- 

 ment, and a goodly proportion of this is represented by the outlay on 

 sport. The moralist may find in this characteristic of ours a bad sign 

 for the future, and of course it is not entirely a good thing to find 

 Young Australia enthusiastic to the highest point of his buoyant 

 capacity on the subject of some form or other of sport, while he 

 remains comparatively indifferent to the attempt to form a literature 

 or cultivate the interests of art, and to the higher political interests of 

 the country in the public life of which its free institutions invite him 

 to take part. But everything comes in its place and time, and for 

 the present the chief concern is to preserve the type of the original 

 f(mnders of the colony, and to secure the permanence of an active 

 and vigorous race not likely to succumb to the enervating influence 

 either of prosperous conditions or a semi-tropical climate. We have 

 the examples of other colonising races before us as a guide, and a 



