I Should Be Sorry To See Them Succeed.

I think it would do a great deal of harm, creating further difficulties in Canada, which I do not desire to see created."

"Certain gentlemen at Toronto" have ever been ready to despoil any old and successful undertaking.

Mr. Gladstone's resolutions, as proposed at the end of the evidence, were negatived by the casting vote of the chairman, Mr. Labouchere, the numbers being 7 and 7. Mr. Gladstone proposed that the country capable of colonization should be withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Hudson's Bay Company; while the country incapable of colonization should remain under that jurisdiction. And, having thus disposed of any chartered, or other, rights of the Company, his last, or 10th, resolution, said, "That inasmuch as the Company has tendered concessions which may prove sufficient to meet the necessities of the case, the Committee has come to no decision upon the question how far it may be, as some think, just and even necessary, or on the other hand, unwise or even unjust, to raise any judicial issue with the view of ascertaining the legal rights of the Company."

The Committee's report recommended that the Red River and Saskatchewan districts of the Hudson's Bay Company might be "ceded to Canada on equitable principles," the details being left to her Majesty's Government. The Committee advised the termination of the government of Vancouver's Island by the Hudson's Bay Company; a recommendation followed, a year later, by the establishment of a Crown Colony. But they strongly advised, in the interests of law and order, and of the Indian population, as well as for the preservation of the fur trade, that the Hudson's Bay Company "should continue to enjoy the privileges of exclusive trade which they now possess."

CHAPTER XI.

Re-organization of Hudson's Bay Company.

Thus, after a long and continuous period of inquiry and investigation - a grave game of chess with the Hudson's Bay Company - many anxieties and a great pecuniary risk, surmounted without the expected help of our Government, the battle was won. What now remained was to take care that the Imperial objects, for which some of us had struggled, were not sacrificed, to indifference in high places at home, or to possible conflicts between the two Provinces in Canada; and to secure an energetic management of the business of the fur trade and of land development by the executive of the Company, whose 144 posts covered the continent from Labrador to Sitka, Vancouver's Island, and San Francisco.

It seemed to me that this latter business was of vital and pressing importance. The Hudson's Bay factors, and traders were, in various grades and degrees, partners in the annual trade or "outfit," under the provisions of the "deed poll." This "deed poll" was the charter under which the hardy officials worked and saved. Their charter had been altered or varied over the long period since the date of the Royal concession, in the twenty-second year of the reign of Charles the Second.

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