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AUSTEALIA. 53
The principal streets are wide, well-paved, and brilliantly
lighted in evening-time with gas. Along the curb-stones, in
some of the streets, nm ripphng streams of pure water.
There is no doubt of its being a decidedly healthy city.
Epidemics are almost unknown. It is said that the first case
of hydrophobia has yet to occur. Could dogs, pleading, ask
for a healthier, better paradise? Nothing surprises me so
much in this country as the museums, fine public libraries,
and free reading-rooms. The city library contains over two
hundred and fifty thousand volumes. Others connected
with the university, or other public institutions, are nearly as
large, and accessible daily, free of charge. This is a blessing
to the poor. The parliament " Education Bill," making
education secular and compulsory, was bitterly opposed by
bishops, priests, and aristocrats. This was to have been expected.
The priesthood in all lands aims to keep the people
in ignorance, or to so monopolize their education as to
turn it into sectarian channels. Education is the key-word
of the age. Schools should be free, and education compulsory,
under all skies. In the ratio that mental and moral
instruction is enforced, crime diminishes. To this end Barlow
says, " It may be safely pronounced that a State has no
right to punish a man to whom it has given no previous instruction.''''
Sir Thomas More writes to this effect in his
" Utopia : " " If you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and
their manners to
be corrupted from their infancy, and then
punish them for those crimes to which their first education
disposes them, what else is to be concluded from this, but
that you make thieves, and then punish them? "
PARKS AND GARDENS.
If flowers are the alphabets of angels, gardens are the
delights off gods and good men. The Melbourne Botanic
Gardens, beautifully situated on the south bank of the flowing
Yarra, some half a mile from the city, cover an area of
a hundred and fourteen acres, and abound in almost an