ers, 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Canada had withdrawn over six hundred thousand able-bodied men.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,