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 the general tax-payer, rather than at that of the individual parent? Why, too, if bent on this general experiment in educational socialism, should they have banished religion from the curriculum?

For the British reader to be able to grapple with these Australian problems, it is, above all things, necessary that he should keep steadily before his mind the utterly different social conditions of the two communities. None of these political problems can be solved so long as we continue to regard them as so many abstract propositions. For instance, it is absurd to argue, because we Australians declined to sanction Wentworth's scheme of creating a brand-new local peerage, that we are all bent on destroying that venerable institution in the mother country. Personally I read the felicitous speech of Lord Balfour of Burleigh, the other day, welcoming the Marquis of Salisbury to Edinburgh, with an historical relish that was heightened by the associations called forth by the high-sounding names of host and guest. But I should only be struck with a sense of the incongruous and the ridiculous in Mr. Smith of Melbourne, or Mr. Brown of Sydney, being suddenly converted into Earls or Marquises. This matter of titles, which is after all a minor matter, furnishes,