"Any one could," MacRae declared, "if he knew the waters, the men, and
was wise enough to play the game square. The trouble has been that each
buyer wanted to make a clean-up on each trip. He wanted easy money. The
salmon fisherman away up the coast practically has to take what is
offered him day by day, or throw his fish overboard. Canneries and
buyers alike have systematically given him the worst of the deal. You
don't cut your cannery hands' pay because on certain days your pack
falls off."

"Hardly."

"But canneries and collectors and every independent buyer have always
used any old pretext to cut the price to the fisherman out on the
grounds. And while a fisherman has to take what he is offered he doesn't
have to keep on taking it. He can quit, and try something else. Lots of
them have done that. That's why there are three Japanese to every white
salmon fisherman on the British Columbia coast. That is why we have an
Oriental problem. The Japs are making the canneries squeal, aren't
they?"

"Rather." Stubby smiled. "They are getting to be a bit of a problem."

"The packers got them in here as cheap labor in the salmon fishing,"
MacRae went on. "The white fisherman was too independent. He wanted all
he could get out of his work. He was a kicker, as well as a good
fisherman. The packers thought they could keep wages down and profits
up by importing the Jap--cheap labor with a low standard of living. And
the Jap has turned the tables on the big fellows. They hang together, as
aliens always do in a strange country, and the war has helped them
freeze the white fisherman out on one hand and exact more and more from
the canneries on the other. And that would never have happened if this
had been kept a white man's country, and the white fisherman had got a
square deal."

"To buy as cheaply as you can and sell for as much as you can," Stubby
reminded him, "is a fundamental of business. You can't get away from it.
My father abandoned that maxim the last two years of his life, and it
nearly broke us. He was a public-spirited man. He took war and war-time
conditions to heart. In a period of jumping food costs he tried to give
people cheaper food. As I said, he nearly went broke trying to do a
public service, because no one else in the same business departed from
the business rule of making all they could. In fact, men in the same
business, I have since learned, were the first to sharpen their knives
for him. He was esta