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 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,—­these few voices, alas, arose only in minor strains and were for the most part drowned by the anvil chorus of the cannery men.

MacRae observed, listened, read the papers, and prophesied to himself a scramble.  But he did not see where it touched him,—­not until Robbin-Steele Senior asked him to come to his office in the Bond Building one afternoon.