and who demanded
answers to the questions.

British Columbia was no exception. The British Columbia coast fishermen
did not escape the influence of this general unrest, this critical
inquiry. Wealthy, respectable, middle-aged citizens viewed with alarm
and denounced pernicious agitation. The common man retorted with the
epithet of "damned profiteer" and worse. Army scandals were aired.
Ancient political graft was exhumed. Strident voices arose in the
wilderness of contention crying for a fresh deal, a clean-up, a new
dispensation.

When MacRae first began to run bluebacks there were a few returned
soldiers fishing salmon, men like the Ferrara boys who had been
fishermen before they were soldiers, who returned to their old calling
when they put off the uniform. Later, through the season, he came across
other men, frankly neophytes, trying their hand at a vocation which at
least held the lure of freedom from a weekly pay check and a boss. These
men were not slow to comprehend the cannery grip on the salmon grounds
and the salmon fishermen. They chafed against the restrictions which,
they said, put them at the canneries' mercy. They growled about the
swarms of Japanese who could get privileges denied a white man because
the Japs catered to the packers. They swelled with their voices the
feeble chorus that white fishermen had raised long before the war.

All of this, like wavering gusts, before the storm, was informing the
sentient ears of politicians who governed by grace of electoral votes.
Soldiers, who had been citizens before they became soldiers, who were
frankly critical of both business and government, won in by-elections.
In the British Columbia legislature there was a major from an Island
district and a lieutenant from North Vancouver. They were exponents of a
new deal, enemies of the profiteer and the professional politician, and
they were thorns in the side of a provincial government which yearned
over vested rights as a mother over her ailing babe. In the Dominion
capital it was much the same as elsewhere,--a government which had
grasped office on a win-the-war platform found its grasp wavering over
the knotty problems of peace.

The British Columbia salmon fisheries were controlled by the Dominion,
through a department political in its scope. Whether the Macedonian cry
penetrated through bureaucratic swaddlings, whether the fact that
fishermen had votes and might use them with scant respect for personages