They had years of experience. He had started with more theory than experience. He was beating them at their own game; largely, he believed, because he came to it with a fresher point of view, a policy based on an understanding, partly reasoned, partly intuitive, of how the logger working for a day's pay feels about his work and the man he works for.
For years before the war, loggers in B.C. coast camps had lived and worked under conditions they were powerless to change. Any sort of accommodation, any sort of food, the lowest wages they could be compelled to accept; that was the logger's portion. The Norquay camps had been better than most, but Rod knew they were bad enough. The logger was hardy, strong, patient, skilful, by a process of elimination.
The war changed conditions without changing the logger's essential qualities. With labor scarce, with timber production a military as well as an economic necessity, with organization in the air, the B.C. logger took the whip hand. His memory was tenacious of old wrongs. He did not ask, he demanded, and his demands were grudgingly conceded because his employers were taking huge profits in airplane spruce, in exportable fir and cedar, in shipbuilding material. And although the timber market took little count of the Armistice, the employers did. With the first demobilization, with the first infiltration of discharged soldiers into the labor market, industrial war was secretly declared. They set out to tame the militant logger who thought that he was entitled to bathtubs, clean sleeping quarters, grapefruit for breakfast if he desired it, and the maximum wage for an eight-hour day.
But the logger did not tame easily. Individually he was a wide-shouldered person with language and spirit to match the muscles developed in the woods. He did not submit without a struggle. Collectively he was organized to fight, and he fought with the only weapons available. The season of 1919 was a period of disputes, grievances, abortive wage cuts, strikes, sabotage, all that goes with a labor war,—a war that in 1919 and well into the next year was a series of lost battles for the employers and corresponding bitterness on their part.
Into this troubled arena Rod Norquay had stepped with his pressing need of continuous operation. He was wise and generous impulses went with his wisdom. He believed that the logger was a simple man who could be led where no man could drive him save under the sharp, spur of acute need. He had believed that the logger was a man and not a mechanism long before he took a year in the woods himself to see what made the common man laugh, weep, fight, play, drink to debauchery and rise sometimes to heroic proportion under stress. He had learned then that man is not so completely the perfect product of class and environment as he superficially seems. Mary Thorn had unconsciously shown him that first. This one and that,—Andy Hall, Oliver Thorn, old Jim Handy the logging boss, even Grove before the war and after, and the crucible of war itself,—had taught him that however the human unit is outwardly shaped by place and circumstance, each is flesh and desire and a creature of passion.
So that it was impossible for him ever to regard his men as so many tools to be used or laid aside as he willed. He was free of the curious detachment of the captains of industry from the lesser ranks. He neither locked himself in the ivory tower of the contemplative spirit, nor fortified himself behind the golden wall of material security. He remained a man in a man's world, directing and shaping the cutting edge of his human tools without once forgetting their essential humanity,—so that they admired him for his deftness of touch.
He had been fortunate in his choice of Andy Hall. Even old Oliver Thorn voluntarily came out of his retirement and directed one part of his operations. Rod did not always know by what occult process he judged men, but he made no mistakes in men. And men are always the prime levers. Machines, powerful, complex, will not operate themselves. They do not create themselves. If mechanism seems to overshadow men, it is only because of a distorted sense of proportion. Hands and brains come first; everything else in the world of men is a by-product. The energy of hand and brain is as necessary as directive force; without that energy, however rude, uncouth, unskilled, there would be nothing to direct; and its reward should be liberal and ungrudging, a right, not a concession. Until Utopia comes in the millennial dawn men must exist under a social and industrial system that is not the creation of a class or a period, but is the slow growth of centuries. Under it the strong, the acquisitive, the self-disciplined, the men of force and character somehow get to the top. But having got to the top, being secure in their power, if they were wise they neither despised nor trampled on those at the bottom.
That was a creed which Rod Norquay, Andy Hall, and Oliver Thorn held in common. These diverse men—Andy, a fiery proletarian rebel, whose steel-trap logic picked fallacies and blunders wholesale in the modern economic system, yet whose inherited instincts drove him to fight with the clan when the clan went to war, and from which he had returned with a touch of bitterness and a tinge of cynicism; Rod himself, a patrician by birth, training, environment, a gentleman in the amplest meaning of that much-abused term; Oliver Thorn, the gentle, contemplative, kindly, shrewd old man—they shared that conviction. It was more than a conviction; it was an article of faith.
"I may be wrong. If I am it will break me instead of getting me what I want," Rod had said to Andy in the beginning. "But this is my idea: men will work faithfully if they are even reasonably satisfied with their job. Men are still capable of loyalty even to a boss and a job, although a lot of propaganda denies it, and the intellectual radicals say it's a slave attitude. I don't mean to fall back on the insincere platitude that the interests of the employer and employee are identical. But I, as well as the men who will work for me, will be faced with a condition, as somebody put it, and not a theory. So long a& they must work for a wage and I must make a profit to keep them employed, anything that will reduce possible friction is worth considering on its merits. So we start on this basis; we forestall agitation for better conditions by setting an example in the way of conditions. We provide first-class living quarters. We serve the best food available. We pay top wages, with the added inducement of a bonus based on production. No man is to be fired for any sort of economic heresy. They are free to do their own thinking, to express their individual opinions about the outfit, about working conditions, about industry in general. They can agitate and discuss any social theory whatever without risking discharge. I don't care whether they are Reds, Syndicalists, Socialists, Free Thinkers, Single Taxers, theorists of any description whatever,—so long as they will devote their working hours to doing the work. That's a general policy. I think it will go. The surest way to breed fantastic theories is to muzzle men through fear. The surest way to make men dissatisfied is to be arbitrary over trifles. The coöperative commonwealth may be a million miles away, but coöperation on the job with benefit to us both is not an impossibility. I think that will work."
It did work. It had an effect beyond mere efficiency on the job. It did away with inhibitions that bred sullenness. When a man was well-fed, well-housed, well-paid, where it was easy for him to see that he was regarded as a human being with certain rights and privileges, an atmosphere of good feeling soon developed.