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follows that this was a disadvantage to any one but the people 

 often hopelessly incapable who were making a living by what 

 passed for teaching. But the mass of scholars thus transferred 

 from private or home tuition to the care of the State had a dis- 

 couraging effect in one respect. The State school teachers of the 

 well-dressed and comfortably placed pupils shrank from encouraging 

 the bare-footed ragged urchins, whose only hope of rescue from the 

 bondage of ignorance lay in the bounty of the State. Thus, while 

 the Minister of Education was pleased enough to confer favours, 

 a weak fear of unpopularity stayed the hand that was empowered 

 to enforce compulsion ; so to this day thousands of the waifs and 

 strays of humanity are not gathered into the fold. The law is 

 intermittently put into operation, and convictions of negligent or 

 defiant parents have reached as high as from 5,000 to 6,000 in a 

 single year. Still, the fact remains that some 10,000 gutter children 

 are, owing to the cupidity or indifference of their parents, debarred 

 from the benefits provided for them at such a lavish outlay. With 

 this very serious drawback the Act has otherwise worked fairly 

 well. It is a generous use of terms to call the teaching given in 

 these schools education, but the rudimentary principles instilled 

 have, in thousands of cases, awakened a desire for pursuing know- 

 ledge for its own sake, and many of the fittest have passed into 

 a career of higher learning, and even distinction, which their 

 environment would have rendered impossible but for the assistance 

 of the State. The larrikin has not been exterminated, and the 

 foul language of the slums still pollutes our streets. These blots 

 are not the fault of the Act ; rather in the laxity of its administra- 

 tion and the withholding of the moral support of the clergy, who, 

 because they cannot have their own way, will take no hand in the 

 so-called irreligious schools. The worst failures of the system are 

 found amongst the denser population of the cities. In the thinly 

 peopled interior it has produced nothing but good, and has been of 

 incalculable benefit to a deserving and industrious class of settlers. 

 The periodical attacks upon it by the Churches are, to say the 

 least, unjust. It was by their influence that Mr. Higinbotham's 

 Bill was lost, and it has been demonstrated beyond dispute that 

 no co-operation amongst the contending sects was possible for 



