THE SYDNEY YOUNG MAN.

Waikato Argus, Volume VI, Issue 384, 19 January 1899, Page 4

THE SYDNEY YOUNG MAN.

Have you ever heard a would-be clever perßon allude to the difference between a child of two or three and the same child when it has reached school age ? the one alert, bright, questioning, the other with shoulders hunched up over a book, thinking nothing worth learning that cannot be got from his grammar and arithmetic? Have you over heard this would-be clever person attribute this change to school life, and advocate loudly for more practical education, "the education of real life, you know ?" I, at any rate, have often heard it, and often agreed with it ;—but, then, I had not seen the Sydney youth. He is, I take it, a fair example of what so-called practical education does, or rather doesn't do, when the despised book-learning is altogether done away with. Not that State school education is absent from this colony ; but it has less grip of the children as a whole ; many escape it; what the boys learn out of doors they remember; what little they painfully absorb in the schoolroom they quickly forget. And the result ? The toy who learns from personal observation is brighter, smarter, more intelligent than his little cousin in the sohoolroom ; but look at the two ten years hence. At the age when the educated youth is beginning to put his sharpened mental powers into practical use, powers that will increase as Dractical experience puts the finishing touch to his years of mind drudgery—at that age the progress of the street youth stops short. In the knowledge of what is good and true, he knows at 18 little more than he does at eight; by 30 his education has long ago ceased. Knows !He knows enough: the name of every hotel in Pitt-street, the inside of all the theatres, the ins and outs of the racecourse, and who won the Cup in such-and-such a year. He may even have acquired a smattering of political knowledge, but he cannot reason on what he has heard. And even the knowledge is of little value, as he has picked it up from people as ignorant as himself. Sydney has boy dudes, boy philosophers, boy criminals, boy sweethearts, but I doubt if it has many boys. Is it a fact, I wonder, that the moat childlike children make the manliest men ; that the precocious youth who smokes his cigarette and joins in conversation with his elders in maturer years reverts to something of that childishness which he skipped at the time when it would have been more suitable ? Perhaps not, yet there seems a lack of moral and mental strength about the Sydney young man. He is languid, as the well-filled busses, cabs, engine trams, and cable cars, continually stepping, well testify. He is too languid to work, too languid to look for work, and is quite content to stay at home and live on his mother or his wife. He is not too languid to bet, gamble and drink ; he is often not too languid to go in for athletics. But the British idea of sport hardly does in a climate like that of Southern Europe. Were the Sydneyite to live more as the Frenchman, he would, like him, have energy enough to help him in the common business of life. As it is his energy—when he happens to have any— exhausts itself physically. _ I think I mentioned in a previous article the strong prevalence of the Jewish type of feature among those who are not of that origiu. This is the case with the young men. In place of the largeframed, red-cheeked, smooth-faced Dunedin specimen of humanity, picture yourself a slight, medium figure with quick brown eyes and a dry, brown face covered with innumerable wrinkles—that is what you pass, over and over again, in the crowded streets of Sydney. That is what you might call the average ; above it is the pot hat and immaculate Bhirt front below it, 'Arry_ with his fancy waistcoat and his 'at tipped back to show his fringe of greasy black hair. But high or low langour is the general characteristic of the Sydney youth. This is well typified by that Australian lad of 16 who shot himself the other day because he felt " tired." Only the average Sydneyite is too tired even to shoot himself.

He marries young, does the Sydney man, so young indeed that he frequently forgets all about it and marries somebody else later on, At least it is charitable to Buppoße that this is due to forgetfulness. This idiosynoracy of his rarely leads to any trouble, bigamy being a matter of too common occurrence to arouse much interest. In marriage, so far as my observation goes, there does not seem that unity which we notice so frequently in New Zealand. Maoriland's domestic life may seem dull and common-place after the excitement of Sydney, but there is no doubt that it ia the land of happy marriages—not blissfully, ecstatically happy but evenly, quietly so. In New Zealand, I fancy, the woman is more her husband's business partner ; she has more to say in regard to the expenditure, if there is money to spare for pleasure she gets her Bhare as a matter of course. In Sydney she gets it as a reward for helping her husband upstairs when he comes home from dining not wisely but too well. Consequently Charlie's next spree is looked forward to as a favourable opportunity for getting baby its new hood or Maria her fresh set of summer attire. Charlie's drunken ness in short is regarded aB <» divine arrangement by which, and by which alone, woman is enabled to get her due.

Of course there are other types _ of young men besides this. In fact I think the " mother's boy " type is more pronounced here than elsewhere. Mothers, seeing the dangers of city life, jealously guard their sons at homo, and this, along with the aforesaid laDgour induced by climate, succeeds in making complete mollycoddles of them. I know of one woman, for instance, whose son has been out of work for five years, yet she will not permit him to leave her in order to Ret work elsewhere, And he stays. Being a Sydney youth, he stays.