“No. But soldering necessitates skilled labour, while crimping is done by machinery. That is why we are compelled to make the change, which will put the canneries to very heavy capital expenditure. Skilled labour is becoming scarce and very dear. We have a great many Orientals in the canneries. Chinamen are most reliable and painstaking: they are good mechanics, they don’t strike, they don’t get drunk, and they are specially adapted for the work that has to be done in a cannery. Previously their labour was cheap, but now that the Government has imposed a head tax of five hundred dollars on every Chinaman who comes into the country, their labour has become dear. One reason why the work does not attract English labour is because it is not constant. The heavy part of it occurs from July 20th to August 25th, though, of course, the making of the cans takes place before then. “I well remember when the Chinese first started. I worked then for a man named John West, who had a little cannery on the Columbia River. George W. Hume was the first man who hired Chinamen. He was forced to do so because of the lack of white labour and the unreliability of what he did get. In order to keep sixty or seventy men for two or three months he had to engage from three hundred and fifty to four hundred, because they kept leaving, and they were constantly getting drunk or striking. They were largely runaway sailors and men of that class, who just drifted around, earning a few dollars here and a few dollars there.” “You took your share,” I suggested, “of the actual practical work?” “Oh, yes,” said the president of the Packers’ Association. “Besides making nets, I fished and lent a hand in all departments.” “No doubt,” I further suggested, “there were some interesting human characters in the salmon fisheries in those days?”