and pretty, but they could not lift a snowshoe far in a day's
journey. Everybody talked too much. That was why they lied and were
unable to work greatly with their hands. Finally, there was a new
human force called "bluff." A man who made a bluff must be dead sure
of it, or else be prepared to back it up. Bluff was a very good
thing--when exercised with discretion.

Later, though living his life mainly in the woods and mountains, he
came to know that the cities were not all bad; that a man might live in
a city and still be a man. Accustomed to do battle with natural
forces, he was attracted by the commercial battle with social forces.
The masters of marts and exchanges dazzled but did not blind him, and
he studied them, and strove to grasp the secrets of their strength.
And further, in token that some good did come out of Nazareth, in the
full tide of manhood he took to himself a city-bred woman. But he
still yearned for the edge of things, and the leaven in his blood
worked till they went away, and above the Dyea Beach, on the rim of the
forest, built the big log trading-post. And here, in the mellow of
time, he got a proper focus on things and unified the phenomena of
society precisely as he had already unified the phenomena of nature.
There was naught in one which could not be expressed in terms of the
other. The same principles underlaid both; the same truths were
manifest of both. Competition was the secret of creation. Battle was
the law and the way of progress. The world was made for the strong,
and only the strong inherited it, and through it all there ran an
eternal equity. To be honest was to be strong. To sin was to weaken.
To bluff an honest man was to be dishonest. To bluff a bluffer was to
smite with the steel of justice. The primitive strength was in the
arm; the modern strength in the brain. Though it had shifted ground,
the struggle was the same old struggle. As of old time, men still
fought for the mastery of the earth and the delights thereof. But the
sword had given way to the ledger; the mail-clad baron to the
soft-garbed industrial lord, and the centre of imperial political power
to the seat of commercial exchanges. The modern will had destroyed the
ancient brute. The stubborn earth yielded only to force. Brain was
greater than body. The man with the brain could best conquer things
primitive.

He did not have much education as education goes. To the three R's his
mother ta