was
formed in Adelaide a few years later, would have made a great deal of
the question of peace and arbitration, just as other branches have done
all over the world; and when the Peace Society was inaugurated a short
time ago I was glad to be able to express my sympathy with the movement
by becoming a member. As I was returning from a lecturing tour in the
south during this time, an old Scotch farm-wife came into the carriage
where I had been knitting in solitude. She was a woman of strong
feelings, and was bitterly opposed to the war. We chatted on the
subject for a time, getting along famously, until she discovered that I
was Miss Spence. "But you are a Unitarian!" she protested in a shocked
tone. I admitted the fact. "Oh, Miss Spence," she went on, "how can you
be so wicked as to deny the divinity of Christ?" I explained to her
what Unitarianism was, but she held dubiously aloof for a time. Then we
talked of other things. She told me of many family affairs, and when
she left me at the station she said, "All, well, Miss Spence, I've
learned something this morning, and that is that a Unitarian can be
just as good and honest as other folk."

CHAPTER XXI

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION AND FEDERATION.

In the debates of the Federal Convention I was naturally much
interested. Many times I regretted my failure to win a seat when I saw
how, in spite of warnings against, and years of lamentable experience
of, a vicious system of voting, the members of the Convention went
calmly on their way, accepting as a matter of course the crude and
haphazard methods known to them, the unscientific system of voting so
dear to the heart of the "middling" politician and the party intriguer.
I believe Mr. Glynn alone raised his voice in favour of proportional
representation, in the Convention, as he has done consistently in every
representative assembly of which he has been a member. Instead of
seeing to it that the foundations of the Commonwealth were "broad based
upon the people's will" by the adoption of effective voting, and thus
maintaining the necessary connection between the representative and the
represented, these thinkers for the people at the very outset of
federation sowed the seeds of future discontent and Federal apathy.
Faced with disfranchisement for three or six years, possibly for
ever--so long as the present system of voting remains--it is
unreasonable to expect from the people as a whole that interest in the
na