The common man himself lifted up his voice in protest and backed his protest with such action as he could take.  Besides the parent body of the Great War Veterans’ Association other kindred groups of men who had fought on both sea and land sprang into being.  The labor organizations were strengthened in their campaign for shorter hours and longer pay by thousands of their own members returned, all semi-articulate, all more or less belligerent.  The war had made fighters of them.  War does not teach men sweet reasonableness.  They said to themselves and to each other that they had fought the greatest war in the world’s history and were worse off than they were before.  From coast to coast society was infiltrated with men who wore a small bronze button in the left lapel of their coats, men who had acquired a new sense of their relation to society, men who asked embarrassing questions in public meetings, in clubs, in legislative assemblies, in Parliament, 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.