HE average bleacherite, were he to take a bat in his hand, could not hit a balloon floating over the plate. The average tennis player is more or less awful. The average golfer takes over 100 (and lies about it). The average writer leaves the reader cold and unmoved. The average boxer is a good deal of a mark. The average lawyer is seldom thoroughly prepared.

Averages run low, but it is the solution of the average man's problem that really counts for anything. The genius needs no "solution." He'll pull through somehow, by definition of genius. But the average one of us is pretty much of a dub, and needs all the "solutions" he get. In the following remarks, therefore, the word "average" is understood as applying to all but the men who are named or referred to for illustration.

can

Take any young fellow starting out, either in business or a profession. Say that he is strong, that he takes good care of himself, that he has plenty of "pep" and a clear brain. One or two, then three, four years go by, but he gets no results to speak of. He has the strength, the energy, the push, and still He he cannot build up the business. knows in his heart that it is not his youth that beats him, that there are as many opportunities as ever, but he is headed for disaster. He may connect up with some established concern or firm, but as an individual he fails.

or

Now there are so many possible reasons for that failure that to attempt to cover the ground would be silly, but if I were the president of a college (which I am not) or the head of any school institution, turning out annually hundreds or thousands of graduates equipped, more or less, to stand their ground in the various walks of life, I would at least point out one rock on which many of them go to pieces-a rock so pitifully easy to avoid that I don't recall ever hearing it even mentioned in a baccalaureate or occupying a niche in the advices to graduates at commencements of school, university, or college, and I've heard a lot of them.

To illustrate: Shortly after the armistice was signed I went to a club to lunch. There were some distinguished worth speakers whose remarks were hearing. It was altogether the best function of its kind I'd ever attended, and I looked up the chairman of the committee in charge, and found it was the late John B. Stanchfield, probably the greatest trial lawyer of his day (great, by the way, because he was simply better prepared in every way than most of his adversaries-he took no chances). I did not know Mr. Stanchfield, but I wrote him that I liked that

type of speaker and hoped we would have more such. He wrote me the day he received my letter expressing his appreciation, and two days later he came into my office and thanked me personally. He'd never heard of me and he was a "fairly" busy man.

In 1916 Roosevelt was being pounded right and left because he was too belligerent and not anxious enough to keep us out of war. I thought he was right, and said so in a letter of about a paragraph in length. He answered me at once from the office of the "Metropolitan Magazine," in a note so cordial that I was almost embarrassed. He didn't know me from Adam of course, and his mail was not small, I imagine.

At the time when Mr. E. H. Gary first appeared publicly in defense of the open shop in the controversy between the Steel Corporation and certain groups of its employees, without going into the merits of the case, I liked the clean-cut way in which Mr. Gary laid down his company's proposition without any beating about the bush or false pandering to labor (labor hasn't any more use for hypocrisy than the rest of us, and Gary knew it). I received a mighty quick and frankly cordial acknowledgment of that note at once.

Now I despise the fools who sit around writing to big men or getting introduced to them, apparently with the idea that they themselves somehow shine by the reflected light of their gods; so don't misunderstand me. In none of these cases-years apart-did I care a continental whether I got an answer to my letter or not. They called for no answer, naturally, and had there been the slightest suspicion from their contents that the writer expected or hoped for one there wouldn't have been any.

If you want to see a man who is a leader, from the President down, you can see him and quickly too-if you have something to say. You can't waste his time, not more than once, but you can see him. It's the little man who doesn't know how to arrange his desk that's always in a "conference" and who never has "time."

I had a client once who got into difficulties with the

ceived a letter from the "stuffed shirt" thanking him for his courtesy in coming to his office rather than calling the meeting elsewhere, and also expressing appreciation of the concise manner in which the matter had been presented by Blankbacher, to the saving of time for all concerned-in other words, a very thoughtful, though wholly unnecessary, letter.

Shortly afterwards I met Blankbacher. He said: "Dot man, he is a fine fella. Fine fella." All his life he's going to have a warm spot in his heart for that lawyer simply because of a very short, but obviously sincere, letter, which didn't have to be written at all; and he'll send all his clients, and he has a lot of them, who find themselves in anything like that kind of a predicament, to that man's office. Also it was just as much a habit on the part of the writer to despatch such a note-he wanted to, felt like it-as it was to put on his hat when he left his office. Those things take half a minute to do, and, even viewed from a selfish angle, mathematically, a certain percentage of them are bound to, and do, bear fruit.

But the matter is deeper, a good deal, than that. I don't care who you are or what your occupation, you come in contact with people day in and day out -that's practically your whole life. All right. You will be successful in these contacts just so far as you can forget yourself and be those people, one after the other, as far as getting their point of view is concerned. If you're dealing with a plumber, be a plumber yourself for the time being, exclude every other thing from your mind but that man's problem, his point of view, his angleif you want to help him-and the same all along the line. Lay your own affairs aside and put every ounce of energy you have at their disposal, and make them feel it, whether you are a doctor, salesman, lawyer, or what not; and there is only one way to make them feel it-mean it. You can't bluff. The dullest customer, the sickest patient, the stupidest client, knows in an instant, and instinctively, whether you have his interests at heart or whether you haven't. The little things are all-fired impor

The "big" man never misses a trick. A kind word, an unnecessary act, has never hurt anybody since the beginning of time, and, sooner or later, they come home to roost. Go out of your way to do things for people, whether you have to or not. Jump in with both feet.

Roosevelt put the secret of his amazing success in a sentence. He said, "I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened." I should say they did!

Photo by Asahel Curtis, Seattle

LASKA is the last of the Ameri

can frontier. Alaska is the only place left where "trails run out I and stop," where people are killed by bears, where unmapped ranges challenge the explorer. In Alaska we are reliving the absorbing story of the West. We see as on a screen the mushroom mining camp and the bleak homestead, the pioneer and the tin-horn gambler, the single-handed enterprise of the frontiersman living on the present and the moneyed interest intrenching for the future, men who create industries and men who play with forests, mines, or water powers as with poker chips. It is the story of Idaho or California retold. Old clashes reappear. The pioneer is restive, the speculator at odds with bureaucrats.

Alaska is the Nation's last big job in frontier management. She contains onesixth as much land as all of the States combined, and ninety-eight per cent of it is National property. Alaska is no longer "Seward's Folly" or "Uncle Sam's ice-box." It is probably no exaggeration to appraise her raw re

sources as equivalent in importance to her area. Because the management of this vast frontier wealth is a National job-and the last of its kind-Alaska is a storm center. Over and above her surge the schemes of politicians, the designs of corporations, constructive proposals, well-based criticisms, biased attacks, and the unreconstructed exploiters of the West who would break Alaska up and parcel her out if they could. Federal mismanagement is held accountable for the slow progress of Alaska, for her decline in population. Incessant reiteration has led many to believe that Alaskan affairs have been muddled by a multiplicity of Federal bureaus, that she has been bound down with red tape, that her industrial growth has been blocked by Conservation theories.

To "free Alaska" it has been urged that all public property and administrative agencies in the Territory be turned over to a local Development Board. Another plan simply regroups certain Federal functions, particularly by transferring the National Forests and water

powers to the Interior Department, on the plea of cutting out conflicts and overlaps in administration. Some of the proposals, like building a National railway from the coast to the interior, like utilizing Federal steamers to give Alaska better marine transportation, are constructive. Some are futile, some are dangerous. The development of Alaska has not been guided wisely in all respects. Certain Federal laws under which she is governed are obsolete or inadequate. Some of them have been enforced too arbitrarily or at too great a distance. But in seeking the progress of our northern frontier there are certain bed-rock facts which every one must heed.

The commercial growth of Alaska is not a matter of laws, bureaus, or regulations. It is a matter of geography and trade. It is controlled by her location on the northwestern tip of the continent; by the cost of moving her products to people who want them; by the value of gold, copper, fish, and paper in the markets of the world; by the cost of labor, machinery, and supplies. Hith

erto there have been no paper mills in the publicly owned forests of Alaska for precisely the same reason that there have been no sawmills in millions of acres of privately owned forests of Oregon. The mining of low-grade gold ore has slumped in Alaska, just as the mining of silver ore slumped in Colorado and Nevada when the cost of producing the metal exceeded its market price. Millions of fertile areas lie untilled in the Yukon Valley solely because the world's wheat market can be supplied more cheaply from North Dakota or Argentina. The deserted placer camps of Alaska are no whit different from Poker Flat and a hundred other abandoned "diggings" in the Sierras. Wise laws and efficient bureaus can, and must, aid the industrial development of Alaska, but they cannot work magic. Alaska is no more immune to the economies of manufacture and trade than any other part of the United States. She will develop only so fast as the markets of the world can absorb her products.

The impatience of the frontier is unwilling to accept these stern realities. Alaska is still under the spell of the gold strike, the quest for quick wealth under which men made fortunes or went broke. And Alaska has a fine faith in herself. Things are bound to happen; new industries are bound to

come.

Something must be holding the country back. And that "something" is found in the way Alaska's resources are governed. The Federal bureaus furnish an easy target. Hence the assertion, often repeated and as often accepted at face value, that the bursting wealth of the young country is padlocked by Washington bureaucrats.

The second basic fact which must be recognized by every one who studies the Alaskan situation is that, whatever faults may exist in her administration, the locking up of natural resources is not one of them. "Pinchotism" has been anathema to many Alaskans because the Conservation policies of Roosevelt and Pinchot were not fully understood, and particularly because their fruition was long delayed by inspired opposition. Extensive withdrawals of forests, water powers, coal and oil lands were made prior to 1910. The Alaskan coal fields were opened to development by the Coal Leasing Law of 1914 and her oil deposits by the Oil Leasing Law of 1920. A number of public water powers were utilized under the inadequate laws preceding the Power Act of 1920, which provides a fair basis for developing these resources comparable to that established for the use of coal, oil, and timber.

men, and settlers of southern Alaska. They have been widely used for fish plants, manufacturing enterprises, settlements, and town sites. They have paid a substantial revenue to the roads and schools of the Territory. They have produced high-grade spruce lumber for the general markets and war needs of the country. Their paper-making resources have been systematically studied and offered for development under terms which insure industrial stability, terms which experienced manufacturers accept. The Federal Water Power Commission is handling more business in Alaskan power sites to-day than in any other section of the United States where the development of forest industries is the commercial motive; and large quantities of National Forest timber have already been secured by paper manufacturers.

Give every bad law and piece of red tape its due weight; the net effect upon the development of Alaska is relatively unimportant. Check off the imposing list of Alaska's resources-metals, fish, timber, coal, petroleum, marble, water power, fur, agricultural land-every one of them is available to men of energy and capital. Every one of them will be developed as rapidly as economic conditions warrant. Let us lay once for all the ghost of the Federal sentry patrolling a dead-line around Alaska's wealth.

The considerable number of Federal agencies in Alaska is often attributed by critics to bureaucratic jealousies and outreachings. What does the presence of thirty-odd administrative and investigative activities in the Territory really signify? Simply the range and vastness of her resources, the number of different things that must be done through public initiative to convert Alaska from a frontier wilderness into a State. With thousands of miles of uncharted coast,

Photo by courtesy of U. S. Forest Service

with the greatest sea-food resources of the world, with many million acres of raw plow land in a climatic zone largely untried by American agriculture, with forests and minerals of vast extent, Alaska has need of the best brains and organized skill of the Government in many different specialized branches. Were the bureaus created for technical or administrative work in these various fields not on the job in Alaska, it would be proof of their inertia or incompetence. No one appreciates this fact better than the thinking business men of Alaska.

Nor will anything be gained by shuffling the Federal agencies in Alaska and redealing them between departments. The work must still be done, and each part of it must be done by specialists in that subject. A staff of rangers, supervisors, and lumbermen will be needed to run the National Forests under Department X no less than under Department Z. This is a large-sized job which cannot be done well without an organization of trained and experienced men and a local head responsible for it and nothing else. There is small prospect of betterment in either cost or efficiency through transferring this organization to some other executive in Alaska and cutting it off from the department which is handling identical work everywhere else in the United States. And what is true of Alaska's forests is true of her fisheries, her agricultural lands, her unreserved public domain, her minerals, her migratory birds.

There would be little sense in having one Federal agency manage the 136,000,000 acres of National Forests in the present States and a different and wholly disconnected organization manage the 20,000,000 acres of National Forests in a future State. There is little to commend, either as business or

ganization or public policy, in having one organization of Federal experts deal with the fisheries of the Atlantic coast and Puget Sound, while a separate and unrelated staff of the same kind-in another department-deals with the fisheries of Alaska. It is not difficult to see whither such proposals lead us. An immediate result is the very duplication of functions and duties in different executive departments which the Government has specifically undertaken to eliminate. A more serious result is cutting Alaska off from the technical and financial resources of Federal agencies whose expert services the Territory needs. The very frontier character of Alaska makes her need all the greater for the best the country can give in developing each group of resources, and that best can be given only by the Federal departments organized and built up for the maximum service, each in its own field. Yet it is even advocated that the Department of Agriculture, the most effective leader in agricultural science the world over, should surrender its experiment stations in Alaska, leaving the future of her farm lands to a local "development board."

Let us not forget that Alaska is part of the United States. Alaska is the last of the Territories, and some day will be a State in her own right. Her geographical and economic relations to the rest of the country are scarcely different from those of Oregon or Washington in 1870. The Nation has the same inter

ests at stake in the agricultural resources of Alaska as in the agricultural resources of the Great Plains, in the forests and water powers of Alaska as in the forests and water powers of the western Cascades. As the migratory birds of the far north cross many States in their yearly travels, so are the products of Alaskan forests, mines, and fisheries distributed over the entire country. The problems of Alaska are simply parts of National problems. Each of them must be treated as a whole. We have developed a National policy as to public water powers, as to public forests, as to public coal and oil deposits. Each of these National policies should be carried out in Alaska by the same National agency as in Wyoming or Oregon, whatever that agency may be, with the same direct relationship, the same fundamental authority, and, above all, with the same public responsibility. The greatest danger underlying most of the proposals for "something different and apart" in Alaska is the danger of a gradual breakdown in the policies which this country has adopted for making its public resources of the widest and most permanent benefit.

What, then, of the overlaps and conflicts in the management of Alaskan affairs, of the duplicating bureaus and harassed settlers? It is a pity that the black and brown bear have at last been placed under the same official guardian, depriving the Alaskan reformer of the most classic example of administrative

absurdity. Much of the red tape which has been criticised in Alaska is in the black and brown bear class-more or less ridiculous and more or less inconsequential. Certain things are serious, like the delay in securing title to public land after all legal requirements have been met or the statutory rule which compels the advertisement of very small lots of National Forest timber before it can be sold. The shifting or consolidation of Federal bureaus would not remedy such conditions in the slightest, and, on the other hand, there is not one of them but could be made right by simple changes in laws that are now obsolete or in the local conduct of public business.

The greatest evil in the management of Alaska is government at long range. Too much authority is kept in Washington. There are too many delays in getting things done. Officers in Alaska are bound by too many cut-and-dried regulations or decisions which may be hoary in departmental usage but are not adapted to the conditions of the far North. The General Land Office, for example, has three separate offices in the Territorial capital-a Register, a Surveyor-General, and a Chief Examiner. They all function independently, each as to its own part in the entry, survey, and patenting of public lands; they all report separately to the Commissioner of the General Land Office at Washington; and none of them finally settles anything. A homestead or mining claim

shuttles back and forth between one or another of these local offices and Washington-four or five round trips at least before a patent is secured, although less than a single acre may be involved. These old laws should be changed. A representative of the General Land Office in Alaska might well direct all of its activities, with authority to accept entries, approve surveys, and issue patents. But the Interior Department should retain control of policies and decide appeals.

Pleas for the mere shifting of bureaus in Alaska may easily divert us from real ways of aiding the Territory. The Government cannot speed up the industrial development of Alaska in any great measure. But in three respects its management can be improved. The first is to overcome Alaska's handicap of isolation, not only by Federal aid in the construction of railways and highways, but also by furnishing adequate marine transportation. The second is to work over the laws dealing with Alaska's resources and bring them in line with a common-sense plan of development and use. Such a law is that requiring advertisement of very small lots

of National Forest timber. Another, of greater importance, prohibits homestead entries, conveying surface rights only, on fertile agricultural land which is underlaid with coal. The legislation dealing with Alaskan fisheries needs revision to prevent a serious depletion of this great resource. Betterments of this sort are in progress, and bureaucrats responsible for work in Alaska are taking the lead in bringing them about.

And, finally, the National interests in Alaska should be handled very largely by men in the Territory itself. Decentralization, the doing of things on the ground, is the cure for red tape. Ninetyfive per cent of the National Forest business in Alaska, including all ordinary uses of land or timber, is despatched by men on the spot. Only large questions of policy and transactions of special importance are referred to Washington. Every bureau or department should place its functions in Alaska under a resident officer intrusted with the greatest authority possible to act on the ground, but by the same token should it retain control of basic policies and stand responsible for their enforcement

through appropriate instructions and inspection. By this means the evils of long-range administration will be overcome, but without endangering our National policies for the use of public resources and without cutting Alaska off from the effective help of each Federal department in its own field.

The greatest National, interests at stake in Alaska are her timber and water power. Sooner or later these resources will support a large paper industry. Trade conditions since the war have brought them into demand and given them commercial value. It is within the power of the people of the United States to create in Alaska a paper industry as enduring as that of Norway or Sweden, an industry which can furnish a million and a half tons of paper yearly for all time to come, or a third of the country's present consumption. For the first time in our history we have an opportunity, in Alaska, to develop the vast forests of a new region as a permanent rather than a disappearing resource, because the Nation owns them. However and by whomever Alaskan affairs are managed, that opportunity must not be lost.

I

T is my candid opinion that no man ought to be allowed to tell a funny story or anecdote without a license. We insist rightly enough that every taxi-driver must have a license, and the same principle should apply to anybody who proposes to act as a raconteur. Telling a story is a difficult thing-quite as difficult as driving a taxi. And the risks of failure and accident and the unfortunate consequences of such to the public, if not exactly identical, are, at any rate, analogous.

This is a point of view not generally appreciated. A man is apt to think that just because he has heard a good story he is able and entitled to repeat it. He might as well undertake to do a snake dance merely because he has seen Madame Pavlowa do one. The point of a story is apt to lie in the telling, or at least to depend upon it in a high degree. Certain stories, it is true, depend so much on the final point, or "nub," as we Americans call it, that they are almost fool-proof. But even so prolix and tire

these can be made

some, can be so messed up with irrelevant detail, that the general effect is utter weariness relieved by a kind of

shock at the end.

what I mean by a

Let me illustrate story with a "nub"

or point. I will take one of the best known, so as to ma e no claim to origi. the famous anecwanted to be "put e it is:

nality-for example dote of the man wh

off at Buffalo." He

A man entered a

leeping-car and said

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

to the porter, "At what time do we get to Buffalo?" The porter answered, "At half-past three in the morning, sir." "All right," the man said; "now I want to get off at Buffalo, and I want you to see that I get off. I sleep heavily and I'm hard to rouse. But you just make

me wake up, don't mind what I say, don't pay attention if I kick about it, just put me off, do you see?" "All right, sir," said the porter. The man got into his berth and fell fast asleep.. He never woke or moved till it was broad day. light and the train was a hundred miles beyond Buffalo. He called angrily to the porter, "See here, you, didn't I tell you to put me off at Buffalo?" The porter looked at him, aghast. "Well, I declare to goodness, boss!" he exclaimed: "if it wasn't you, who was that man that I threw off this train at half-past three at Buffalo?"

Now this story is as nearly fool-proof as can be. And yet it is amazing how badly it can be messed up by a person with a special gift for mangling a story. He does it something after this fashion:

"There was a fellow got on the train one night and he had a berth reserved for Buffalo; at least the way I heard it, it was Buffalo, though I guess, as a matter of fact, you might tell it on any other town just as well-or no, I guess he didn't have his berth reserved, he got on the train and asked the porter for a reservation for Buffalo-or, anyway. that part doesn't matter say that he had a berth for Buffalo or any other

place, and the porter came through and said, "Do you want an early call?-or no, he went to the porter-that was itand said-"

But stop. The rest of the story becomes a mere painful waiting for the end.

Of course the higher type of funny story is the one that depends for its amusing quality not on the final point, or not solely on it, but on the wording and the narration all through. This is the way in which a story is told by a comedian or a person who is a raconteur in the real sense. When Sir Harry Lauder narrates an incident, the telling of it is funny from beginning to end. When some lesser person tries to repeat it afterwards, there is nothing left but the final point. The rest is weariness.

As a consequence most story-tellers are driven to telling stories that depend on the point or "nub" and not on the narration. The story-teller gathers these up till he is equipped with a sort of little repertory of fun by which he hopes to surround himself with social charm. In America especially (by which I mean here the United States and Canada, but not Mexico) we suffer from the story-telling habit. As far as I am able to judge. English society is not pervaded and damaged by the storytelling habit as much as is society in the United States and Canada. On our side of the Atlantic story-telling at dinners and on every other social occasion has become a curse. In every