Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord
had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to
me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land--and that country
is the United States of America. What's Australia? A big, thirsty,
hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign
speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns--also for
the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel
sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European 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 deadly poison, called the
sentiment of patriotism, had been "educated" out of the stomachs of the
people. "Patriotism!" he exclaimed scornfully. "My country! The darned
fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators,
the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves--the men the
patriotic fools starve and fight for--their masters. Ba-a!"

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the