Part 7

She believes in the modern scientific spirit, and in none other. “Let us, then,” she says, in her heart, “let us, then, by all means, move towards Federalism. Union is strength.” But the eager grasping nature of her swarm of intelligent labourers will not let her see that the wisdom of her penny tariffs is but the foolishness of the pounds to come. New South Wales, on the other hand, is adverse to Federalism. She does not understand this modern scientific spirit—she dreads it, is jealous of it, and admires it! It is so self-reliant, so self-confident! And she, poor thing, is too much under the sway of the ancient historical spirit to perceive that there is also a modern historical spirit, and that it is good and at her doors. Hence her changeableness, hence her irresolution in the matter. Like her clever unscrupulous politician, Sir Henry Parkes, yesterday she wanted Federalism, to-day she does not: she will not be dragged at the chariot wheels of this dreadful modern scientific spirit which she does not understand, with Victoria shouting and cracking a stockwhip to urge on the horses faster and faster. Is she not the “Queen of the Pacific?” did not Governor Philip tell her she would be “the centre of the southern hemisphere—the brightest gem of the Southern Ocean?” and who shall say he counted her chickens before they were hatched?

To the disinterested seeker, then, after a really fine civilization, it is hard to say which is the more painful sight—Victoria, with her resolute pursuit of a purely intellectual future, which must end in arid barrenness, or New South Wales with her fatuous attachment to the monstrous aspect of the past and present. Which, after all, is the better or the worse, illusion or delusion? Is Victoria never going to perceive that logicians and engineers are not the highest product of civilization? Will New South Wales never shake off the British architect, spiritual and material, and begin to evolve an individual life of her own? Is Mr. Marcus Clarke right when he tells us that “in another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism, his national policy a democracy tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sufficient brain-power to sin with zest.” Yes, this is indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are represented by the illuded progress of Victorian, the deluded stagnation of New South Wales. “_The virtuous tradeswoman and the wife of the wealthy lower orders, walking in the happy hunting-grounds of the British architect!_” What a picture! It is a satisfaction to think that, if it is to be, we shall never live to see it. But the question arises, “Is _it to be_?” Has not this acute perceiver of ours been once more writing down one aspect of the thing as _the_ aspect, without staying for a second or third look at the thing itself? is not this a clever view of a part, but a fantastic view of the whole? has not Mr. Clarke, in a word, been leaving us this appalling picture of our future in much the same spirit as the world-wounded Hamlet left his cruel dowry to Ophelia? This, we are agreed, was indeed the future of the two tendencies, which are represented by the illuded progress of Victoria, the deluded stagnation of New South Wales; but we should add—_only if they are left to themselves_.

_Only if they are left to themselves_; and it is our hope, our trust that they will not be. We hope, we believe, that these two countries will learn from one another, each the lesson which the other will be competent to teach: that Victoria will awake to the vital importance of giving her Upper Class a Higher Education to correspond to the Elementary Education that she is giving her Lower Class, and that this Higher Education may be one filled with what we have called the modern historical spirit, with culture, with literary Culture: that New South Wales, leading and instructing Victoria here, having first learned from her example to have the courage to evolve an individual life of her own, will in her turn imbibe the modern scientific spirit, will imbibe what I may call scientific Culture; and thus we shall be brought on to the day in which the people of Victoria and New South Wales shall, from their superficial differences, be united by common qualities better than those of fretfulness, cleverness, perverseness, irritability: For in this people lies the possibility of a really fine civilization, in the marriage in them of emotion and intellect, of poetry and prose.

“Is the goal so far away? Far, how far no tongue can say. _Let us dream our dream to-day._”

One last word on the last of the three vital questions of the day—Higher Education. When, on 1st April, Mr. Patterson, who presides over the Victorian Education Department, went down to Malmsbury to lay a foundation-stone for the Wesleyan denomination, and favoured us with his views on this question, or rather on the education system as it at present stands in Victoria, we had a hope (a faint hope) that he would do something more than sing the praises of the denominational schools in general, and the state schools (“those majestic monuments to enlightenment,” as he says in his profuse political way, “that adorn and bless even the remotest portions of this colony”)—the state schools in particular. Our hope was destined to disappointment. Mr. Patterson had something to say about “the only legitimate checks on the abuse of political power when conferred upon the masses,” and about “the unscrupulousness, as well as the boldness beyond reason” of that man who “would deny that the rising Australians, for sobriety and unassuming intelligence, would compare favourably with the old stock,” so that he “was bound to record his conviction that the future of Australia would be quite safe in the hands of the Australians.” He had also ready a defence of the secular character of the teaching in the state schools, and some nice little left-handed compliments for our good Wesleyans, _et hoc genus omne_, but not a word, and apparently not a thought, for the legitimate checks on “the abuses of _educational_ power when conferred” on a middle-class as unprepared for rule as the worst education in the world can make it. “The Australian public,” he says, “desires, above all things, to ensure good citizenship.” The Australian public cares little that, in the state schools which it has founded for that especial purpose, dead dry intellectual knowledge is rampant—“that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles,” as Milton disgustedly puts it, “which is commonly set before our youth as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docile age”—“inanimate mechanical gerund-grinding,” as Carlyle equally disgustedly called it—gerund-grinding and spiritual cockatoo screeching. Nor yet does it care that, in the denominational schools in which its own children are being brought up, the only supplement to the dead dry educational knowledge of the gerund and the cockatoo, is the merest flimsy smattering of Science caricatured and Literature misunderstood. Let us not, however, despair because our sucking colonial statesmen cannot see more than a few educational inches in front of their noses. Have we not got Dr. Moorhouse, our good Bishop of Melbourne, with us, “a mighty man with broad and sinewy hands?” And does he not, on every available opportunity, batter against the brazen walls of the gerund and the cockatoo, and bid them leave off grinding and screeching, and listen to reason? And here, too, is our good Roman Catholic Bishop of Sydney, Dr. Moran (whom we are all so sorry to think of losing), expressing his “fears that the atmosphere of the public schools is too chilly for a great many of our youth?” Perhaps one of these mornings the Victorian public will wake up, tired of listening to the chatter of the religious and secular dogmatists gathered together like eagles over the carcase of “Religion without Superstition,” and there may arise a curiosity and a care for Higher Education and High Schools; and we will hope, then, that no one will be foolish enough to say that they have been a very doubtful success in New South Wales and in Sydney—in Sydney, the home-elect of the six-fingered and six-toed giant of British Philistinism! And, perhaps, some day poor little Culture, putting off the cumbrous armour with which the gerund and the cockatoo want to load him, taking his sling in his hand and a few smooth stones from the brook, may smite great Goliath in the forehead, and cut off his head, and there be a signal rout of all the Philistines, even unto Gath and Gaza and the utmost borders of the land.

_May, 1885._

[NOTE.—I am tempted to republish here a letter, which I sent lately to the _Sydney Morning Herald_ wherein one aspect of the secondary education question was (more or less unconsciously) being discussed. No one, so far as I am aware, thought the letter worth serious consideration: at any rate no one thought it worth replying to, perhaps the reasons for its insertion were simply those which the “able Editor” assigned to me for the insertion of all his correspondence, namely that it be not either too illiterate or too offensive for publication. Well, I am sure that for my own part I am grateful for even so much toleration as this, and shall strive, as becomes my humble position in this great Australian press, to continue to deserve it.]

A RUGBY FOR NEW SOUTH WALES.

(_To the Editor of the Herald._)

SIR,—In your issue of Saturday, May 9th, Mr. Edwin Bean, of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, brought under serious consideration the suggestion made by your correspondent “A. N.,” as regards what he called “A Rugby for New South Wales.” Anything that a schoolmaster of Mr. Bean’s talent and experience has to say must be interesting to those of us (alas, too few!) to whom the question of secondary education, whether in England or Australia, is a care. He will understand, then, that when I pass over, almost without notice, his criticisms on the individual aspects of the “reproduction” here “of that which is certainly best,” as he says, “in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit”—that the only reason of my doing so is the fear of encroaching too much on your “valuable space.” For, interesting as these criticisms are, the interest which lies in what I take to be the two real points at question here is, I must think, greater: these two points being (_1_), _the growing sense in all competent judges of discontent with the present condition of middle-class secondary education in Australia_; (_2_), _the means of ameliorating this condition_.

As regards the first point, I must here almost take it for granted, in the face of the fact that, so far as I am aware, there is not a single colonial politician who seems to realise that if the education of the People, the rulers of the future, is of vital importance to us all, the education of the Middle-, or, as we should say now, the Upper-class, the rulers of the present, is of importance at least quite as vital. The mass of intelligent men here, then, or, as we are wont to say, the intelligent public, naturally enough, holds the same opinion about upper-class secondary education that their political representatives do. “It is all right,” they say. “What are you grumbling at in these ‘private adventure schools,’ as you call them? They do well enough, we think, for us upper-class people; and if you want your son to have a really first-rate education, why, are there not plenty of fine Denominational schools about—the King’s School, Newington, and so on, and our splendid Grammar-school?” The only answer to “prophesyings” of this sort is, that the Upper-class, as a class, are, whatever they may think themselves, simply abominably educated; their education is, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable; and the sole necessary proof of this is, that a good three-quarters of the knowledge acquired by an average boy at an average private adventure school is of no subsequent use whatever to him, either in the culture of himself or in the prosecution of his business or trade. As for the best Denominational schools where a secondary education is to be obtained, if inadequate, at any rate much superior to that of the private adventure schools, these are out of the reach of the pockets of the average upper-class people, who, even if they appreciate this misfortune (which, as a rule, they do not), are unable to remedy it.

Here, then, as it seems to me, lies the difficulty; and we have now to look at the solution which the apparent tendency of things is proffering to us. “If ‘A. N.,’” says Mr. Bean, “had resided in Victoria, he would have learnt that the Public schools (as they are there called) of Geelong and Melbourne are already taking something of the position, and aspiring to fulfil the functions, of the English public schools.... And,” he goes on, “at Paramatta, Stanmore, Bathurst, Bowenfels, and elsewhere, there are already boarding-schools, not private, but belonging to Denominational corporations, which, if fostered by private assistance, will eventually grow into something resembling the Public schools of England.” Mr. Bean is, of course, right. If things progress in the way in which they are now progressing, if our colonial statesmen turn all their attention, and as much of ours as we will give them, _to_ the education of the People, and _from_ that of the Upper-class, then, I say, more and more will the Upper-class be thrown into the hands of schools which are mere private speculations, which are really under no control but that of personal caprice (and the personal caprice, great heavens! of what a stamp of intellectual and spiritual man), which, accordingly, provide an education, even when judged by its own miserable standard, superficial, incoherent, impalpable. And these other schools, I say, the best Denominational and Corporation schools, the Australian Public schools of the future, will become more and more the educational monopoly of the professional and wealthy portion of the Upper-class, just as in England they have become that of the aristocracy and these portions of the Middle-class. These “_great schools_,” exclaims Mr. Bean justly of the English Public schools—“_which have done so much to form the character of the English gentleman_.” Of the English gentleman? Yes, and alas! of the English middle-class man, that terrible and pathetic being whom Mr. Arnold has taught us to know as the British Philistine. “I declare,” says General Gordon, the hero-elect of this very class, “I declare I think there is more happiness among these miserable (Soudan) blacks, who have not a meal from day to day, than among our middle-classes. The blacks are glad of a little handful of maize, and live in the greatest discomfort. They have not a strip to cover them; but you do not see them grunting and groaning all day long as we see scores and scores in England, with their wretched dinner-parties and attempts at gaiety where all is hollow and miserable.”

What a future for the Upper-class, the by far largest class of Australia! What an appalling solution to an educational difficulty is this:—_A small class made up of our squatters, professional men, and wealthy tradesmen, forming a sort of intellectual and spiritual aristocracy; our Upper-class not only itself intellectually and spiritually dull and debased, but debasing and dulling all the better spirits which, in their social ascension, pass into it from the ranks of the People._ The thought of such a future to those of us to whom the progress onward and upward, whether of England or of Australia, is a care, is appalling, heartrending, unendurable! There is nothing that we could do, by the devotion of our powers, energies, and means, that we should not, would not, do to prevent it. And we should be, and are, encouraged in our struggle against it by the reflection that the real deep true spirit of the time is against all monopoly, practical and physical, intellectual and spiritual—that once the Upper-class, and after them the People, is aroused to the realisation of the fact that there is a danger here of the formation of a new aristocracy, an aristocracy which, with all its charm (let us suppose) of social manners and of intellectual and spiritual culture (and this is supposing a very great deal), means nothing less than the materialisation, the dulling and the debasing, of everything beneath it—when the Upper-class and the People, I say, are aroused to the realisation of this, we may be sure that they will not rest till they have prevented it.

And how, it is asked, is such a future to be prevented? how such a present to be ameliorated? By the formation, not of Denominational and Corporation schools at a charge which places them out of the reach of all save the richer among us, but by the formation of Public State schools that provide a secondary education as good, and, we will hope, better, than that of these others, and at a charge that is within the reach of the average upper-class people. “Yes, but,” at once is answered, “such schools already exist in the High schools, and they have not been a success.” I will not here contest, although I well might, the first assertion; but I cannot, if I would, contest the second. I began by noticing the cause of it, this general satisfaction of “the intelligent public” with the educational pabulum provided for its offspring. I deplore it; I hope for the day of its removal to the gulf of oblivion. In the meantime all that can be done is to strive to assist this “consummation devoutly to be desired” earnestly and perpetually.

One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned for speaking of such an unimportant entity) than _I_ am, with the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be, “that which is certainly best in the English Public schools, viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated, and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean, what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of State schools is the excessive interference of the State, the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in England to such an appalling extent was this the case that the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the Public schools, which were being quite left out in the cold! Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,” quite comprehended.

With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable space” on which I have encroached in even this far too perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,

I am, etc.,

There is no one whose opinion on this question of secondary education is more worthy of our attention than that of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Our debt of gratitude to him for the general advancement of the Idea of Culture, not only at home, but everywhere where our language is spoken, is so great that we have begun to accept it almost as an impersonal fact. The work which he did long ago, and has never ceased to recapitulate, for the cause of middle-class secondary education, can only be appreciated by those whose attention has been turned to it more especially. This, I hope, will hold me excused to him for quoting here from a letter of his to me, some expressions of his, and the more so as they seem to show something like a modification of the view he has so far publicly enunciated. “I think,” he says, “I see signs that the education question is likely to present itself at no distant date in this wise: ‘Shall the majority give public money for any education except the education necessary for every citizen?’ The education necessary for every citizen will be somewhat extended in scope, but no account will be taken of the higher culture hitherto deemed necessary for a leisured and governing class, and to which so great a mass of endowment has been made to contribute. On the Continent of Europe a great change will be produced if this new view prevails, for the endowments have in general been seized by the State, and the State has directly subsidised secondary and superior instruction. In England it has not, but the endowments which these instructions enjoyed have been left to them. Probably they will not be taken away, but further public aid will hardly be given. Nor do I think it will be given in the Colonies; and as there the endowment of secondary and superior instruction is inconsiderable, these instructions will be, as they are now, at a great disadvantage. The wealthiest people will send their sons to be educated in England; private schools will, of course, exist locally, but I do not think they will have influence enough to create a class and a power out of those they train. Society will thus be, on the whole, much more homogeneous than with the old nations of Europe; but, as in the United States, this condition of things will have its own dangers and drawbacks. The best way to meet them is for individuals to keep up a love of genuine culture in themselves, and so to create an even larger force in the nation to favour it.” Of the truth, or very probable truth, of the educational future here drawn out, there can, alas, be little question. M. Renan, whose work for France can well be paralleled with that of Mr. Arnold for us, takes an even gloomier view. We may count ourselves lucky, he says, if Democracy will consent, not to encourage, but to tolerate independent study. Democracy, he says, again, is the advent of universal mediocrity, of that most terrible of mediocrities, the aggressive. “Great qualities,” cried Empedocles, facing the same problem as we do,

“Great qualities are trodden down, and littleness united is become invincible.”