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Free-trade—Federalism—Higher Education, they all, I say, go together; but if one is more important than the other, then it is the last. Improvement, real improvement, must always be from within outwards, not from without inwards. All abiding good comes, as it has been well said, by evolution not by revolution. “Our chief, our gravest want in this country at present,” says Arnold, “our unum necessarium, is a middle-class, homogeneous, intelligent, civilized, brought up in good public schools, and on the first plane.” How true is this of Australia too, of Melbourne! There are State schools for the lower-class, but what is there for the great upper educated class of the nation? The voluntary schools, the “private adventure schools.” And what sort of education do they supply either in England or here? “The voluntary schools,” says a happy shallow man in some Publishers’ circular I lit on the other day, “the voluntary schools of the country” [of England] “have reached the highest degree of efficiency.” This, to those who have taken the trouble to study the question, not to say to have considerable absolute experience in the English voluntary schools—this is intelligence as surprising as it ought to be gratifying. To such men, the idea they had arrived at of the English voluntary schools was somewhat different; their idea being that these schools were, both socially and intellectually, the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the civilized nations of Europe. “Comprehend,” says Arnold to us Englishmen, and he might as well be saying it to you Australians, “comprehend that middle-class education—the higher education, as we have put it, of the great upper educated class—is a great democratic reform, of the truest, surest, safest description.”