There is little doubt that very soon, in all other professions as well as that of engineering, the scant population will mean a serious lack of employment for all the upper classes. The young doctors and dentists want patients; the architects want houses to build and towns to plan; the surveyors and engineers want new country opened, new railways, new mines; lawyers and land agents want clients. It is always the same; the educated few must depend for their living on the more or less uneducated masses, the people engaged in that class of labour for which numbers are required. A township with a bank-manager and clerk, doctor, parson, and lawyer would fare badly if it could show only an equal number of factory hands, labourers, or masons. And yet this is what education and prosperity seem likely to do for us, a tendency which the present influx of immigrants is too small to counteract. There must be more people to doctor, to bank for, to legislate for, and to teach, in proportion to the number of highly-educated young men and women who are now being prepared at school and college for professional life or clerical duties.
It seems to me that too many people have made money in Victoria; that too many have risen from the ranks of the manual labourers, with sons and daughters whom they naturally wish should go even one step higher than themselves.
There was an old dairyman, I once knew, not far from Melbourne, who kept a dozen or so cows, milked them himself with the help of a boy, tended them himself, and drove his own carts to town. He was a peasant to the backbone—and that’s no bad thing to be, better by far than any half and half—a delightfully genial old son of the soil, while his wife, who had probably never been in bed later than six any morning during her entire life—unless she was ill—and would not have dreamt of expecting the duties of her tiny household to be done by anyone but herself—washing, cooking, sweeping, scrubbing, making, and mending from dawn to dark—was just the same homely sort of old body as her husband. Still the boy who helped the old man with the cows was not theirs, but a mere, ever-changing hireling. Humble and contented as the old couple were, they yet cherished a wider ambition for their son, who had in truth nobly fulfilled their expectations; passing from the State school on to college; training for a doctor; walking the hospitals; passing all his examinations with flying colours; and, finally, with the old man’s help—help that had been made possible only by infinite never-ending toil—bought a country practice, and took his place among the professional classes.
A thing like this is very fine. It stirs one’s pulse, and warms one’s heart even to think of the self-denial of those two dear old people, and the gallant success of the boy. But there is another side to the question, a prosaic, matter-of-fact side. If there had been ten sons, instead of one, there would have been no money to spare for extra education; there would have been less care possible, less thought, less food for every individual member of the family, and therefore less chance of development. The ten sons would have become milkmen, dairy-hands, labourers, or artisans—and a good doctor have been lost to the State. But still, which is the most needed? Now when the vast empty spaces of the Continent are crying out for population and subsequent cultivation? The small families, which are the almost inevitable rule among the better sort of people—the weak-minded and undesirable breed as freely here as elsewhere—may be for the good of the individual, but they are certainly not good for the State, where quantity is required more than quality—apart from that of good sound bodies—and where there is already almost too much “cleverness.” The art, the literature, the general quickness of comprehension, the business methods, they are all clever—they are not profound or intellectual; neither are they plodding. They are the outcome indeed, for the most part, of the adored only child, whose every word and action is a miracle. Australia needs larger individual families, producing a deeper subsoil of hard-working people, without too many ideals, while as the mother of a nation it needs to open its arms, to enlarge its sympathies, and to get rid, once for all, of that “precious only child in the world” idea by which it seems each year to grow more completely engrossed—I mean the “Australia for the Australians” ideal.
CHAPTER VII
ALIEN LIFE
Melbourne is not a cosmopolitan city. It neither lies in the direct route of globe-trotters, who will, indeed, often miss the whole of Australia and pass on to New Zealand or the Pacific Isles, nor does it possess many natural interests or curiosities. It is a level-headed place, too, and, though it amuses itself well enough, it does not cater for that class of people who will search the world over for a new sensation or exotic pleasure. If strangers come to Melbourne it is for the most part either to find work and carve out a new future for themselves, or to escape from the responsibilities and duties which they have pressed too insistently on them in the Old World. In either case they find that their aim is best accomplished by identifying themselves as much as possible with the life of the country and people, which is, indeed, so vital and compelling that it quickly robs them of all national characteristics, so that they, or at any rate their children, very soon become completely Australian. It is very difficult for us, who in England count time by centuries, to realize during how very few years Australia has existed for the white man, and for how still shorter a period Victoria has had a separate existence to New South Wales. Indeed, only in the year 1855 was it declared a State, while but twenty years earlier, in 1835, Melbourne was for the first time occupied by white people.
That any country at the most between seventy-five and eighty years old—the average life-span of one man—should have formed out of the conglomerate masses of different classes which have poured into it from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and in a lesser degree from France and Germany, such a truly distinctive race is scarcely believable, while if it has a little outgrown its strength, if it does suffer at times from that complaint which its own people designate as “swelled head,” is it to be wondered at? For there it is, in spite of all, an indisputable fact, a nation in all its characteristics, and not a dependency.
That there must be some strange, ever-moving yeast at work, either in the climate or the circumstances of life, which shows an overpowering tendency to draw all within its grasp; to work on it and with it; to amalgamate it into the general mass, I can quite believe; and this yeast is the spirit of Australia. Something stronger than the entire pull of home apron-strings, of gratitude, of association, and of blood.
It all tends perhaps to the loss of individuality, but individuals are not needed in a new country; what is needed is one great family which will present as a whole an unbroken phalanx to the world. Exceptions, however brilliant, do but break the ranks; no one has time to bother with, or be bothered by them. One must keep step with the regiment, or one will be left behind to die of privation.
Yet it is, on the whole, that very necessity for ever pushing onward, for hewing wood and drawing water to keep this marvellous new household going, that makes Melbourne such a cruelly hard place for the merely intellectual man or woman, the writer, the artist, the poet, the dreamer. Between the upper and nether millstone of the merchants, professional classes, and landowners, and the artisans, mechanics, and labourers, they are crushed so closely that their very existence is apt to remain unnoticed. It is no good blaming these people; it is not their fault; it is part of the rough, crude necessity of nation-building; we start by giving a naked man a shirt; there is no time to worry over people who offer to hemstitch frills for it, even gratis, while he is shivering.