Page:While the Billy Boils, 1913.djvu/73

 slaves in the towns, and like dingoes in the bush―who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet haven't any more spunk than to graft for a few cockney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven't even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw a few dams across their watercourses, and so make some of the interior fit to live in. America's bad enough, but it was never so small as that.…Bah! The curse of Australia is sheep, and the Australian war cry is Baa!'

'Well, you're the first man I ever heard talk as you've been doing about his own country,' said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being sat on all the time. '"Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never said―to―to himself"…I forget the darned thing.'

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat for action, and the driver―for whom the bagman had shouted twice as against the stranger's once―took the opportunity to observe that he always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him, and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to prove that that was all rot―that patriotism was the greatest curse on earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false, ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the world would never be any better until the