And there were other phases which previously I had scarcely suspected. The race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. All great successes, as I was beginning to discover for myself, were relatively gifts, the teachings of the self helpers and virtue mongers to the contrary notwithstanding. Artists, singers, actors, policemen, statesmen, generals, were born and not made. Sunday-school maxims, outside of the narrowest precincts, did not apply. People might preach one thing on Sunday or in the bosom of their families or in the meeting-places of conventional social groups, but they did not practice them except under compulsion, particularly in the marts of trade and exchange. Mark the phrase “under compulsion.” I admit a vast compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or impulses of individuals. That compulsion springs from the settling processes of forces which we do not in the least understand, over which we have no control and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand, blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect. Politics, as I found in working as a newspaper man, was a low mess; religion, both as to its principles and its practitioners, a ghastly fiction based on sound and fury, signifying nothing; trade was a seething war in which the less subtle and the less swift or strong went under, while the more cunning succeeded; the professions were largely gathering-places of weaklings, mediocrities or mercenaries, to be bought by, or sold to, the highest bidder. The individual, as I found, was trying to do one thing: make himself happy principally; life was plainly trying to do another, or at least what it was doing involved no great concern for the welfare of any particular individual. He might live, he might die; he might be well fed, he might be hungry; he might, accidentally or by taking thought, ally himself with successful movements, or he might inherently, by some incapacity or fatality of disposition, involve himself in the drifts toward failure; he might be weak, he might be strong; he might be wise, he might be dull or narrow. Life in the large thrashing sense in which we see it to move about us cared no whit for him. Why so many failures? I was constantly asking myself; so many early deaths, so many accidents, crass and unexplained? Why so many fires? So many cyclones? So many destroying epidemics? So many breaks in health or in trade or by reason of vice or crime or mere increasing age and mood? So many, many individuals going down into the limbo of nothingness or failure, so few attaining to that vast and lonesome supremacy which all were seeking? Why? Why? I persistently asked myself; and I have yet to find the answer in any current code of morals or ethics or the dogma of any religion.