ing land best suited for communication and settlement, for which she would provide the means of local administration. The districts best suited for this are those on the Red River and the Saskatchewan. It is hoped that arrangements may be made between the government and the Bay Company for ceding to Canada on equitable principles these districts, the authority of the company in them then to cease. The details of the arrangement would be maturely considered by Parliament. If Canada is not at once ready to undertake the government of the Red River district, some temporary provision may be made. It will be well, as soon as convenient, to terminate the connection between the company and Vancouver's Island, and to extend the colony on the latter. As to the extensive regions both of Rupert's Land and of the Indian Territory, of which there is no present prospect of their settlement by any of the European race, view must be had to three possible dangers: the risks of lawlessness and disorder; the fatal effects on the natives of competition in the fur trade, and the greater freedom for introducing spirits; and the danger of the indiscriminate destruction of the fur-bearing animals. For these reasons the committee judge that, whatever may be the validity, or otherwise, of the rights claimed by the company under its charter, it is desirable that it should continue to hold its privilege of exclusive trade, though limited by the foregoing considerations. The committee cannot say how far the claims of the company, based on its chartered rights, may obstruct, but hope for an amicable adjustment of the matter, through conciliation and justice. A bill in the next session of Parliament may provide an equitable and satisfactory arrangement.

Before making a cursory review of the points of inquiry and evidence in this elaborate parliamentary investigation, an incidental topic presents itself in the appearance, as both a member of the committee and as a witness before it, of a gentleman already referred to, the Right Honorable Edward Ellice. His associates must have found some amusement in his skill and fence. In questioning witnesses he showed that skill in seeking to guard the credit and interest of the company: he would draw out vouchers of the necessity, the justice, and the practical wisdom of its policy; that it treated the natives humanely, providing for their own improvement, medical service, and civilization; that it was compelled to forbid competition in trade; and that its territory was wholly unsuited for agricultural settlements. Mr. Ellice showed his fence as a witness by holding the committee strictly to its official authority within a certain range of inquiry. He dodged all questions of a personal or private nature. He stoutly refused to make revelations about the profits or to give the names of the shareholders of the company, intimating that that was not the committee's business. He was confronted with an extract from a book of his old partner, McGillivray.1 This asserted that "Selkirk, having acquired the majority of votes, held the Bay Company under his thumb, and thus secured his immense tract of country, and that the attorney-general ought to look into it." Mr. Ellice

1 A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, 1815.

naively replied that perhaps he himself was the author of that "libel" on He had written and uttered as bad ones at the time of

the company.

He himself wrote a book in 1816.

violent contests. The principal points of inquiry by the committee concerned the company's relations to the natives and influence upon them in trade and intercourse; the use of spirituous liquors; efforts of civilization and education; the profits of the company; the consequences of competition and free trade; the quality of the soil and its adaptation for flourishing agricultural settlements.

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In all the official inquiries and hearings before the colonial board and parliamentary committees, when the affairs of the chartered company were brought under investigation in consequence of the frequent petitions and complaints coming from mercantile and other parties interested in opposition, these petitions and complaints becoming steadily more earnest and severe till the object of them was effective, -the representatives of the company, as well as its assailants, were very sharply questioned as to the influence wrought by the policy of the company on the condition and experience of the aborigines. It seems to have been generally assumed that the company was under some obligation, expressed or implied, to have in view the welfare of the natives, to help and raise them as human beings, to add to their means and comforts of living, and to seek their moral and religious advancement. It has been already admitted that the charter imposed no obligation of this sort; that in fact it made no reference whatever to the subject. This fact, however, was not accepted as discharging the company from the manifest obligations of civilized humanity. The fact was notorious that the natives had been serviceable to the company in insuring it a scale of pecuniary profits unparalleled in any other mercantile business, and the interest was one of something better than curiosity to know how the other parties to the trade, who, by perilous and severe toil through a desolate wilderness, were subtracting from it its precious wealth, were benefited, or, it might be, injured in the results.

Many large and searching questions covering this subject were put in general terms. The answers to them, when not reluctantly made, were 'evasive and vague. As the questions became sharper, more specific, or pointed, the disclosures drawn forth were certainly unsatisfactory in the light of humanity, even if they exposed a course of proceeding and dealing more or less compelled by circumstances or required by policy. The questions were such as these: Had the number of the Indians increased or decreased during the long period of the company's intercourse with them? Were their wild habits softened and their physical comforts multiplied? Had they been persuaded and aided to take the first steps toward civilization by forming fixed abodes, subduing parcels of ground, devoting themselves to tillage in its simplest processes, and making provision in times of plenty for the seasons of famine, during which it was known that starvation had frequently driven many of them to cannibalism?

Did the company provide at its posts surgeons and physicians, medical and hospital stores, for the aged and infirm Indians who had been in its service? Had any efforts been made and any expense been incurred by the company in providing schools and moral and religious instruction for the natives?

It is interesting to scan the information drawn out from the friends as well as from the opponents of the company in answer to these searching questions. The information has a very important bearing upon a subject on which much has been said and written without a proper regard for the facts involved in it. There has been very much boasting and complacency on the part of Englishmen, and very much of censorious criticism uttered by them, on the plea that the American aborigines have always received far more just and humane treatment from all the various classes of Englishmen, traders, colonists, and soldiers, than from the citizens of the United States; that Englishmen have almost uniformly been at peace with them, while American citizens have been in a continuous state of warfare; that they have multiplied under British dealing with them, and wasted away from the contact of the United States. Leaving out of view much else that might be said on this subject, especially the prime consideration of the steady pushing on the frontiers of civilization in the interests of the actual settlement and improvemer.t of territory by American citizens, an enterprise never entered upon by Englishmen till within quite recent years, enough information was drawn out, in the inquiries just referred to, to reduce all grounds of boasting or complacency on the side of Englishmen.

It was shown, as a matter of course, that the relations of the company and its servants with the Indians had been uniformly peaceful and friendly. Any acts of trespass, or insolence, or violence on the part of the intruding Englishmen, who had come, not to settle, but to traffic, and that, too, in articles which they themselves could not directly obtain, would have been worse than folly. The first stations of the company were close to the shores of the bay, and it was very long before it ventured to penetrate farther in towards the interior at positions on lake and river connecting outposts with their base. And when it did so, it was only tentatively, feeling the way carefully, and after having assured the interest of the nearest Indians by traffic. Peace was a prime essential. True, some of the posts of the company from the first, and those afterwards advanced farthest inland, were called "forts" as well as "factories." But the term "fort" could not in seriousness be attached to more than some half dozen of the posts from first to last occupied by the company, especially two upon the bay and two upon the Red River territory. A simple stockade surrounding a blockhouse was generally the most that was offered in the way of protection and defence. And some of the most exposed trading posts, the farthest inland, were wholly defenceless. Their security against violence lay entirely in the recognition that each one of them represented a powerful company, with which Indians were concerned to be in amity.

The company was understood to admit that its influence over and its

effect upon the natives, especially such of them as were not in most intimate relations with its officers and servants, had been impaired and modified by rivalry in the fur trade, by the license of individual traffickers, and by other agencies interfering with its sole responsibility in the matter. Where the company regarded itself as alone in the field, its monopoly was held as investing it with a sort of judicial authority and obligation. So long as it had only the natives to deal with, and the intercourse of the natives was confined strictly to its officers and servants, order and amity were preserved. The natives regarded these first white men, furnished with all the cunning instruments and appliances of civilization, medicines, tools, clocks, burning-glasses, music-boxes, and magic-lanterns, as a superior sort of beings, evidently in favor with the great "Manitou." These supposed supernatural resources were not disclaimed by those who found their account in the assumed possession of them. But when free traders from Canada and the United States, and missionaries with their various creeds, came in to tempt, and bribe, and confound the natives, the influence of the company over them was greatly reduced, and it was very ready to diminish its sense of responsibility. A prominent resident in the colony, not unfriendly to the company, and himself an earnest Scotch Presbyterian, utters himself very frankly upon this point: "It is denied by many, nor do we pledge ourselves to the fact, that the company ever contemplated such a sacrifice [the support of missionaries] for the sake of the gospel; but this we know, and so may others who are in the least conversant with the nature of their trade know, that the introduction of Christianity to Rupert's Land was destructive of its very sinews."2 This certainly is a most frank admission of the fact that the engrossing interest of the company was to regard and to use the natives with sole reference to a mercantile object, without care for anything that would elevate them in the scale of humanity or improve their own condition. It appeared in evidence that some of the more influential officers and representatives of the company withstood the efforts of missionaries in the settlement to induce in their converts a suspension of ordinary labors on the Sabbath.3

As for the rest, the whole weight of the evidence drawn from the questioning of the company as to its relations with the natives, on the matters above referred to, disclosed that the company acted with sole and exclusive regard to its one towering, paramount, and absorbing aim, the accumulation of profit from trade. Whatever tended to advance this object the company favored; whatever would hinder or was inconsistent with it, the company resolutely opposed. The Indian was to be drawn into the condition of dependence, and the more earnest and industrious he could be induced to

1 See Lieut. Butler's Report to Lieut.-Gov. Archibald, of Manitoba, Appendix to Butler's Great Lone Land.

2 Ross's Red River Settlement, p. 297.

3 A sly reflection upon the wholly secular aims of the company was dropped in a witty

sarcasm uttered by an observer of its policy. Being asked by a stranger the meaning of the letters "H. B. C." inscribed on the flying flag at one of the posts, he answered, "Here Before Christ."

become the better for the company, if not for him. It soon became the custom of the company to keep all the natives that hunted and trapped for it in its debt, by making an advance to them in supplies, when settling the accounts of the previous year. The natives were in fact reduced to a state of slavish dependence on the traders. It would have been not only difficult

as against the whole grain and bent of nature in the man of the wilderness, but equally as thwarting the greed of the traders, to have induced the former to apply himself to the tasks of agriculture. When his presence and labor were needed to till and gather his crops, he would be away, perhaps hundreds of miles, hunting and trapping. The Indians in fact became so increasingly and wholly dependent upon the resources of the company as to render themselves perfectly wretched without it. Before the coming of the fur traders they had had warring in their tribes, to what extent in losses or calamities no servant of the company, with a view to the interests of history, seems to have concerned himself to learn when the information might have been obtained. Up to their intercourse with the whites, the Indians had found their own implements, weapons, and resources wholly sufficient for them. It was afterwards found that when these had been disused for a generation it took nearly a lifetime to learn to make them serviceable again. The subsistence and clothing of a few scattered Indians required but a slight draft upon the creatures of the wilderness. Every portion and fragment of a buffalo, hide, flesh, sinew, horn, tendon, and bone, served some frugal use of the Indians. But when thousands of these hordes on the plains were slaughtered for their hides and tongues only, it was found that the terms "infinite" and "countless," applied to their numbers, were exaggerations. When the beaver, the silver-fox, the marten, and the otter had a value assigned to them by fashion, in London, Paris, and China, the instincts of these creatures were circumvented by the intelligent greed of the savage, and the slaughter raged among them. Firearms, ammunition, and steel traps triumphed over the bow and arrow and the simple snare. An entire change was brought about in the character and habits of whole tribes of Indians. Game in many localities was exhausted, and when no peltries were brought into the posts the supplies failed. Starvation followed. It was proved that the company had not provided physicians and refuges, and that it had done nothing for the teaching of the Indians or for their moral and religious welfare; that missionaries and teachers, after long complaint and remonstrance, had been forced into the territories of the company by benevolent agencies; and that when the company had been shamed into a grudging addition of a pittance for these objects, it was used as "a sop" to avert or silence just complaints. And worst of all, a vast amount of evidence proved that whenever and wherever the company was in rivalry or collision with other bodies, or even with single individuals, in the fur trade, it made the freest use of intoxicating liquors, to the most fearful demoralization and ruin of the Indians.

The writer of these pages need hardly interpose a disclaimer that these