Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

"There may be," MacRae pursued the thought. "I read a book by Wells not long ago in which he speaks of God as the Great Experimenter. If there is an all-powerful Deity, it strikes me that in his attitude toward humanity he is a good deal like a referee at a football game who would say to the teams, 'Here is the ball and the field and the two goals. Go to it,' and then goes off to the side lines to smoke his pipe while the players foul and gouge and trip and generally run amuck in a frenzied effort to win the game."

"You're a pessimist," Stubby declared.

"What is a pessimist?" MacRae demanded.

But Stubby changed the subject. He was not concerned with abstractions. And he was vitally concerned with the material factors of his everyday life, believing that he was able to dominate those material factors and bend them to his will if only he were clever enough and energetic enough.

Stubby wanted to get in on the blueback salmon run again. He had put a big pack through Crow Harbor and got a big price for the pack. In a period of mounting prices canned salmon was still ascending. Food in any imperishable, easily transported form was sure of a market in Europe. There was a promise of even bigger returns for Pacific salmon packers in the approaching season. But Stubby was not sure enough yet of where he stood to make any definite arrangement with MacRae. He wanted to talk things over, to feel his way.

There were changes in the air. For months the industrial pot had been spasmodically boiling over in strikes, lockouts, boycotts, charges of profiteering, loud and persistent complaints from consumers, organized labor and rapidly organizing returned soldiers. Among other things the salmon packers' monopoly and the large profits derived therefrom had not escaped attention.

From her eight millions of population during those years of war effort Canada had withdrawn over six hundred thousand able-bodied men. Yet the wheels of industry turned apace. She had supplied munitions, food for armies, ships, yet her people had been fed and clothed and housed,—all their needs had been liberally supplied.

And in a year these men had come back. Not all. There were close on to two hundred thousand to be checked off the lists. There was the lesser army of the slightly and totally disabled, the partially digested food of the war machine. But there were still a quarter of a million men to be reabsorbed into a civil and industrial life which had managed to function tolerably well without them.

These men, for the most part, had somehow conceived the idea that they were coming back to a better world, a world purged of dross by the bloody sweat of the war. And they found it pretty much the same old world. They had been uprooted. They found it a little difficult to take root again. They found living costly, good jobs not so plentiful, masters as exacting as they had been before. The Golden Rule was no more a common practice than it had ever been. Yet the country was rich, bursting with money. Big business throve, even while it howled to high heaven about ruinous, confiscatory taxation.

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.