to whom votes were a prerequisite to political power, may remain a
riddle. But about the time Jack MacRae's new carrier was ready to take
the water, there came a shuffle in the fishery regulations which fell
like a bomb in the packers' camp.

The ancient cannery monopoly of purse-seining rights on given territory
was broken into fine large fragments. The rules which permitted none but
a cannery owner to hold a purse-seine license and denied all other men
that privilege were changed. The new regulations provided that any male
citizen of British birth or naturalization could fish if he paid the
license fee. The cannery men shouted black ruin,--but they girded up
their loins to get fish.

MacRae was still in Vancouver when this change of policy was announced.
He heard the roaring of the cannery lions. Their spokesmen filled the
correspondence columns of the daily papers with their views. MacRae had
not believed such changes imminent or even possible. But taking them as
an accomplished fact, he foresaw strange developments in the salmon
industry. Until now the packers could always be depended upon to stand
shoulder to shoulder against the fishermen and the consumer, to dragoon
one another into the line of a general policy. The American buyers,
questing adventurously from over the line, had alone saved the
individual fisherman from eating humbly out of the British Columbia
canner's hand.

The fishermen had made a living, such as it was. The cannery men had
dwelt in peace and amity with one another. They had their own loosely
knit organization, held together by the ties of financial interest. They
sat behind mahogany desks and set the price of salmon to the fishermen
and very largely the price of canned fish to the consumer, and their
most arduous labor had been to tot up the comfortable balance after each
season's operations. All this pleasantness was to be done away with,
they mourned. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was to be turned loose on the
salmon with deadly gear and greedy intent to exterminate a valuable
species of fish and wipe out a thriving industry. The salmon would all
be killed off, so did the packers cry. What few small voices arose,
suggesting that the deadly purse seine had never been considered deadly
when only canneries had been permitted to use such gear and that _they_
had not worried about the extermination of the salmon so long as they
did the exterminating themselves and found it highly profitable,--t