A

LASKA is the last of the Ameri

can frontier. Alaska is the only place left where "trails run out 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

BY W. B. GREELEY

CHIEF, UNITED STATES FOREST SERVICE

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.

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.

The twenty million acres of National Forests in Alaska have always been open to local use or export. They have supplied every sawmill on the Alaskan coast with its logs. They have furnished packing-cases and piling to most of the Alaskan salmon canneries and mining timbers to many of her mines. They have provided free building material and fuel for the prospectors, fisher

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

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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 develop ment 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 these can be made so prolix and tiresome, can be so messed up with irrelevant detail, that the general effect is utter weariness relieved by a kind of shock at the end. Let me illustrate what I mean by a story with a "nub” or point. I will take one of the best known, so as to make no claim to originality-for example, the famous anecdote of the man who wanted to be "put off at Buffalo." Here it is:

A man entered a sleeping-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 daylight 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

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phase of social and intellectual life one is haunted by the funny anecdote. Any one who has ever attended a Canadian or American banquet will recall the solemn way in which the chairman rises and says: "Gentlemen, it is to me a very great pleasure and a very great honor to preside at this annual dinner. There was an old darky once-" and so forth. When he concludes he says, "I will now call upon the Rev. Dr. Stooge, Head of the Provincial University, to propose the toast 'Our Dominion.'"

Dr. Stooge rises amid great applause and with great solemnity begins, "There were once two Irishmen-" and so on to the end. But in London, Not England, it is apparently not so. long ago I had the pleasure of meeting at dinner a member of the Government. I fully anticipated that as a member of the Government he would be expected to tell a funny story about an old darky, just as he would on our side of the water. In fact, I should have supposed that he could hardly get into the Government unless he did tell a funny story of some sort. But all through dinner the Cabinet Minister never said a word about either a Methodist minister, or a commercial traveler, or an old darky, or two Irishmen, or any of the stock characters of the American On occasion repertory. another I dined with a bishop of the Church. I expected that when the soup came he would say, "There was an old darky--" After which I should have had to listen with rapt attention, and, when he had finished, without any pause, rejoin, "There were couple of Irishmen once-" and so But the bishop never said a word of the sort.

a

on.

I can further, for the sake of my fellow-men in Canada and the United States who may think of going to England, vouchsafe the following facts. If you meet a director of the Bank of England, he does not say: "I am very glad to meet you. Sit down. There was a mule in Arkansas once," etc. How they do their banking without that mule I don't know. But they manage it. I can certify also that if you meet the proprietor of a great newspaper he will not begin by saying, "There was a Scotchman once." In fact, in England, you can mingle freely in general society without being called upon either to produce a funny story or to suffer from one.

I don't mean to deny that the American funny story, in capable hands, is amazingly funny and that it does brighten up human intercourse.

But

the real trouble lies, not in the fun of the story, but in the painful waiting for the point to come and in the strained and anxious silence that succeeds it. Each person around the dinner table is trying to "think of another." There is a dreadful pause. The hostess puts up a prayer that some one may "think of another." Then at last, to the relief of everybody, some one says: "I heard a story the other day-I don't know whether you've heard it-" And the

grateful cries of "No! no! go ahead," show how great the tension has been.

Nine times out of ten the people have heard the story before; and ten times out of nine he damages it in the telling. But his hearers are grateful to him for having saved them from the appalling mantle of silence and introspection which had fallen upon the table. For the trouble is that when once two or three stories have been told it seems to be a point of honor not to subside into mere conversation. It seems rude, when a story-teller has at last reached the triumphant ending and climax of the mule from Arkansas, it seems impolite, to follow it up by saying, "I see that the ex-Emperor Karl has escaped again." It can't be done. Either the mule or Karl-one can't have both.

The English, I say, have not developed the American custom of the funny story as a form of social intercourse. But I do not mean to say that

A GREAT LOVE

BY

DOROTHY CANFIELD

"A Great Love" will be
published in The Outlook
next week.

This is the second of the By-
ways of Human Nature series
of character stories by the au-
thor of "The Brimming Cup."
"Old Man Warner" appeared
in The Outlook of January
11. It has been read with
keen appeciation. One reader
praises it as an acute, search-
ing, yet humorous delineation
of New England character
that has few equals.

Three other stories in this
series will follow "A Great
Love."

they are sinless in this respect. As I see it, they hand round in general conversation something nearly as bad in the form of what one may call the literal anecdote or personal experience. By this I refer to the habit of narrating some silly little event that has actually happened to them or in their sight, which they designate as "screamingly funny," and which was perhaps very funny when it happened but which is not the least funny in the telling. American funny story is imaginary. It never happened. Somebody presumably once made it up. It is fiction. Thus there must once have been some great palpitating brain, some glowing imagination, which invented the story of the man who was put off at Buffalo. But the English "screamingly funny" story is not imaginary. It really did happen. It is an actual personal experience. In short, it is not fiction but history.

The

I think if one may say it with all respect-that in English society girls and women are especially prone to narrate these personal experiences as contributions to general merriment rather than the men. The English girl has a sort of traditional idea of being amusing; the English man cares less about it. He prefers facts to fancy every time, and as a rule is free from that desire to pose as a humorist which haunts the American mind. So it comes about that most of the "screamingly funny" stories are told in English society by the women. Thus the counterpart of "put me off at Buffalo" done into English would be something like this: "We were so amused the other night in the sleeping-car going to Buffalo. There was the most amusing old Negro making the beds, a perfect scream, you know, and he kept insisting that if we wanted to get up at Buffalo we must all go to bed at nine o'clock. He positively wouldn't let us sit up-I mean to say it was killing the way he wanted to put us to bed. We all roared!"

Please note that roar at the end of the English personal anecdote. It is the sign that indicates that the story is over. When you are assured by the narrators that all the persons present "roared" or "simply roared," then you can be quite sure that the humorous incident is closed and that laughter is in place.

Now, as a matter of fact, the scene with the darky porter may have been, when it really happened, most amusing. But not a trace of it gets over in the story. There is nothing but the bare assertion that it was "screamingly funny" or "simply killing." But the English are such an honest people that when they say this sort of thing they believe one another and they laugh.

But, after all, why should people insist on telling funny stories at all? Why not be content to buy the works of some really first-class humorist and read them aloud in proper humility of mind withEither out trying to emulate them? that or talk theology.