s
much for our own Churches."

"But you're in favour of socialism and democracy?" asked Joe.

"Of course I am. But the world won't do any good arguing over it.
The people will have to get up and walk, and, what's more, stick
together--and I don't think they'll ever do that--it ain't in human
nature. Socialism, or democracy, was all right in this country till
it got fashionable and was made a fad or a problem of. Then it got
smothered pretty quick. And a fad or a problem always breeds a host of
parasites or hangers-on. Why, as soon as I saw the advanced idealist
fools--they're generally the middle-class, shabby-genteel families that
catch Spiritualism and Theosophy and those sort of complaints, at the
end of the epidemic--that catch on at the tail-end of things and think
they've caught something brand, shining, new;--as soon as I saw them,
and the problem spielers and notoriety-hunters of both sexes, beginning
to hang round Australian Unionism, I knew it was doomed. And so it was.
The straight men were disgusted, or driven out. There are women who hang
on for the same reason that a girl will sometimes go into the dock and
swear an innocent man's life away. But as soon as they see that the
cause is dying, they drop it at once, and wait for another. They come
like bloody dingoes round a calf, and only leave the bones. They're
about as democratic as the crows. And the rotten 'sex-problem' sort of
thing is the cause of it all; it poisons weak minds--and strong ones too
sometimes.

"Why, you could make a problem out of Epsom salts. You might argue as to
why human beings want Epsom salts, and try to trace the causes that
led up to it. I don't like the taste of Epsom salts--it's nasty in
the mouth--but when I feel that way I take 'em, and I feel better
afterwards; and that's good enough for me. We might argue that black is
white, and white is black, and neither of 'em is anything, and nothing
is everything; and a woman's a man and a man's a woman, and it's really
the man that has the youngsters, only we imagine it's the woman because
she imagines that she has all the pain and trouble, and the doctor is
under the impression that he's attending to her, not the man, and the
man thinks so too because he imagines he's walking up and down outside,
and slipping into the corner pub now and then for a nip to keep his
courage up, waiting, when it's his wife that's doing that all the time;
we might argue that it's all force of imaginat