lf that he would like to see any
other man in the valley who could make an estimate like that, and be
sure of it, who would know what facts to gather and where to get them,
on the cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work
and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where,
and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these
cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks.
It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common
workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They
weren't and that was all there was to be said about it. Any one of them,
any single one of his employees, put in his place as manager, would run
the business into a hole as deep as hell inside six months. And if you
put the whole lot of them at it, it would only be six weeks instead of
six months before the bust-up.

There again, what people kept saying about life, things clever people
said and that got accepted as the clever things _to_ say, how awfully
beside the mark they seem to you, when you found out actual facts by
coming up against them. What a difference some first-hand experience
with what you were talking about, did make with what you said. What
clever folks ought to say was not that the workmen were as good as the
head or the same sort of flesh and blood, because they weren't; but that
the head exploited his natural capacities out of all proportion, getting
such an outrageous share of the money they all made together, for doing
what was natural to him, and what he enjoyed doing. Take himself for
instance. If by some freak, he could make more money out of being one of
the hands, would he go down in the ranks, stand at a machine all day and
cut the same wooden shapes, hour after hour: or drive a team day after
day where somebody else told him to go? You bet your life he wouldn't!
He didn't need all the money he could squeeze out of everybody
concerned, to make him do his job as manager. His real pay was the
feeling of managing, of doing a job he was fitted for, and that was
worth doing.

How fine it had always been of Marise to back him up in that view of
the business, not to want him to cheat the umpire, even if he could get
away with it, even though it would have meant enough sight more money
for them, even though the umpire didn't exist as yet, except in his own
conscience, in his own idea of what he was up to in his business. Neve