instinctive. He expected to make money out of his business, he was eager
to make money, but he saw very clearly that it was only in and through
the tireless labor of the fishermen that he could reap a profit. And he
was young enough to be generous in his impulses. He was not afraid, like
the older men, that if those who worked with their hands got a little
more than sufficient to live on from season to season they would grow
fat and lazy and arrogant, and refuse to produce.

Money was a necessity. Without it, without at least a reasonable amount
of money, a man could not secure any of the things essential to
well-being of either body or mind. The moneyless man was a slave so long
as he was moneyless. MacRae smiled at those who spoke slightingly of the
power of money. He knew they were mistaken. Money was king. No amount of
it, cash in hand, would purchase happiness, perhaps, but lack of it made
a man fall an easy victim to dire misfortunes. Without money a man was
less than the dirt beneath the feet of such as Robbin-Steele and Hurley
and Gower, because their criterion of another man's worth was his
ability to get money, to beat the game they all played.

MacRae put himself and Stubby Abbott in a different category. They
wanted to get on. They were determined to get on. But their programme of
getting on, MacRae felt, was a better one for themselves and for other
men than the mere instinct to grab everything in sight. MacRae was not
exactly a student of economics or sociology, but he had an idea that the
world, and particularly his group-world, was suffering from the
grab-instinct functioning without control. He had a theory that society
would have to modify that grab-instinct by legislation and custom before
the world was rid of a lot of its present ills. And both his reason and
his instinct was to modify it himself, in his dealings with his fellows,
more particularly when those he dealt with were simple, uneducated men