Circumstances had forced it on him, partly.

Sitting now in his room, where he was counting the cost of becoming a merchant prince, he could look back to the time of a boyhood passed in the depths of ignorance and vice.

He knew what this Self within him was; he knew how it had forced him to grope his way up, to give this hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom and knowledge.

All men around him were doing the same,--thrusting and jostling and struggling, up, up.

It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of glittering prizes.