Here was a learned man of religious authority taking me seriously. I felt seasick. I just sat.

“Now, whoi on earth did ye set up to interfere with the birthrate?” He laughed again. “Arragh! Ye must have got ye’r ideas from that father of ye’rs.”

Pa rubbed his hands together as he does when really pleased, and said I formulated my ideas myself; but he added that if a young person had a mind made for ideas they came out of the air.

I did not know what Father O’Toole meant by interference with the birthrate, but he said my condemnation of large families for pioneer women. Why, bless him, the country is crying out for population. Pioneering and population, according to him, are two things that should go together like strawberries and cream.

It was inspiriting to have a real person to argue with. I put forward my pity for overburdened women dying worn-out before their time. I advanced cases where even the doctors said the women would die if they had any more babies. “And what for?” I demanded. “Just to delve away from week to week at a lot of dull tasks—some of them superfluous. No beauty but the sunset and the moonlight.”

His Reverence said that I was suffering from the divine discontent of genius, that it was a different matter with common people. If their noses weren’t kept to the grindstone—Ha! Ha! Ha!—rearing families and working, they would get into all the devil’s mischief in the world. Sure, we must fill up Australia and hold it from the Yellow Peril at our doors.

We must ourselves become a swarming menace to out-swarm the Yellow Peril! What a reason for spoiling our part of the earth! What a fate, to be driven to a competition in emulation of guinea pigs!

I pointed out to the Reverend gentleman that he didn’t add to the population himself, that he was safe from the burdens of both fathers and mothers, that if he were a woman he might think differently. No woman should be expected to have a big family in addition to drudging at a dozen different trades. I suggested that the unfortunate Yellow Peril women might be relieved to enter into an alliance with us to stem the swarming business.

“Ah, but ye’re all wrong, ye’re arguing against NATURE. Ye mustn’t interfere with Nature.”

“As for that,” interposed Pa, “All human civilization is a conquest of Nature.”

“Yes, but ye can’t change human nature.” Father O’Toole laughed loudly.

“I don’t think that to call an overdose of lust and verminous fecundity human nature is God’s will,” I contended, “and that I maintain, despite dads and the divils and all of divinity.”

“Whoi would ye set yourself up against all of theology?”

“And why not? if her thinking apparatus suggested it,” said Pa. “I often think myself that we have to take out a licence to keep a dog but the most undesirable man is not restricted in thrusting upon his fellows and his unfortunate wife, as many as a dozen repetitions of himself.”