ANOTHER NEW COLONY.
" IT is always presumptuous to decide hastily between man and nature," says the Colonial Minister, in vindicating the right of our race to colonize any lands within the range of the British dominions which are still unoccupied. Strange to say, sound as the maxim is, it is a welcome novelty in the utterance of the Co- lonial Office. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton makes the remark 1.1 order to qualify the supposition that t ere is a considerable tern re. the northern borders of British America which ought not to " to be He is saying that there are grounds occupied by savages and wild animals domains for the proper order of which, is some degree, the English sceptre is responsible, while the in- clemeney of the climate and the sterility of the soil forbid the settlement of organized society. In that region man and nature are scarcely in conflict ; nature herself excludes man in his civil- ;zed ed condition; and in that region, therefore, if civilization is to assert its rule at all, the Crown must offer some reward for those who will perform the work of police, and defend human justice where voices are seldom heard save the roar of the wild beast or the cry of the untameable bird. In this region, therefore, Sir Edward. Lytton supposes, we may for some time to come give such preference and licence to the commercial company which has hitherto been hunter, tenant, and ruler, in order that the British Crown may be represented by its tenant ; and it is probable that after the maturest deliberation so much will ultimately be con- ceded. But who can say exactly where the bound of that land lies? Ask the Russian what degree of cold cuts off man from the occupation of land ? Ask the denizen of Orkney or Shetland with how much of sterility man's industry can contend ? Ask the backwoodsman of America itself what " irreclaimable " forests have not been reclaimed and made to yield under the advance of cities ? It is impossible to determine precisely where the bound of colonization shall be ; and it is evident, therefore, that in any provision for the future,, the Hudson's Bay Company must be content to take a lease subject to modification,—to occupy lands which shall with the march of cultivation gradually con- tract.
But if it is " always presumptuous to decide hastily, between man and nature," how vast the presumption must have been which has heretofore decided against man and in favour of "na- ture," as it is called, throughout an enormous region, which we must compare for extent, not with the United Kingdom, but with far larger dominions ; a region not sterile and inclement, like
the Arctic borders of the Hudson's Bay territory, but watered
by fertile rivers ; varied by vast prairies as beautiful as any that ever charmed and delighted the Missouri traveller ; by dense woods, proving the fertility of the soil beneath, and inviting the settler, as certainly' as ever Canada invited him; by lakes and broad rivers—by all that can attest richness of soil, fertility, and the visits of a ripening sun ? Heretofore, the Colonial Office has decided againat man in his capacity of settler, and in favour of " nature "—the euphuism for the Hudson's Bay Company. It was said that the vast region must be " left to nature," the object being to retain a hunting-ground, with some kind of magnificent sovereign rights, for a great corporation. The Hudson's Bay Company holds its tenure under a charter of Charles the Second, which grants to it certain lands of undefined boundary. The clerks and collectors of the Company, &sling with the natives or with the wandering trappers, have traced their path through the wilds and woods, over lake and prairie, until they have dotted the whole American continent, towards its northern end, with their stations. They have absorbed the North-west Company, which once threatened to rival them and to disturb their tenure. But the greatest doubts exist as to the validity of the charter. Lord Bury stated one fundamental doubt. The Charter was granted by Charles the Second at a time when the region anot in the possession of England but of France; he nted what was not his to grant. Again, where are the boundaries of the lands granted ? It is a rule in law, not always very closely observed, that that cannot be conveyed which is purported to be conveyed by indefinite terms ; but here is the Hudson s Bay Company claiming parts of the American Continent which were only known to exist by the science of geography at the time when the title accrued. We admit the services per- formed for geography by the Hudson's Bay Company ; we remem- ber well the spot defined on some older maps where " the sea" was " seen by Mr. Hearn in 1771 " ; we have traced with the bold and enterprising Mackenzie the course of the river named after him to its embouchure in the north-west ; we have sympathised with his aspirations to explore the passes in the upper range of the Rocky Mountains, and trace the source of the Peace River. These men were the forerunners of the imperial discoverers who have traced the northern outline of the American Continent ; they have assisted to disclose the value of those lands which we now call upon the Company, to surrender. Admitted ; but the Company itself cannot, and does not, pretend to hold these vast territories on the dog-in-the-manger principle. It has attempted to be something more than it really, is—the East India Company of Arctic America ; but it has failed. It has encountered something more formidable than the Sepoy, in the absence of man and the presence of savage elements. Moreover' its whole man'sement has naturally turned principally upon the collection of those articles on which its own .commerce depends; it has relied upon the hunter, and seldom does the hunter, even when incorporated, thoroughly sympathize and act with the agriculturist. He belongs to an anterior age ; he exercises arts which he cannot teach lus suecessor ; and it is flying in the face of " nature " to hold the boundless hunting grounds, which the Hudson's Bay Company by a species of ostensible occupation, as an immense pre- 8, erfe, to the exclusion of the settler, the trader, the builder of towns, and the founder of society. It is the outrage of William the First,—his New Forest repeated on a scale of transatlantic magnitude, and in the face of modern principles; it is William's aesPotieln converted to a bad joke in which the offender asks society to be his accomplice. Indeed the Coiiipiiny, ciItiftsed that--
it could not retain its dominions on these principles when it fell in with Lord Selkirk's project of establishing the Red River settle- ments ; an experiment which is a total failure as the pioneer of colonization, and has only succeeded as a practical confession that the Hudson's Bay Company knows what it ought to accomplish, but cannot.
The question has become practically important ; it may be put in these terms. Between Lake Superior and Vancouver's Island lies a part of the American continent of immense breadth, ex- tending in latitudes to the south as well as the north of this country, possessing all the raw materials of agricultural and com- mercial wealth, and peculiarly exposed just at present to dangers which concern the empire as well as the interests of Canada and of the English emigrants. Many political considerations enter into this view of the subject. Of late years there has been a very great improvement in the state of British North America, and the contrast once exhibited in the culture both of the soil and of the inhabitants between the States and the British provinces, has been removed where it has not been reversed. Thus an expansive tendency has been developed in British North America which has been practically checked by the preoccupation of the Hudson's Bay Company. In the meanwhile the American has e d his migrations to California ; the Government of the Fe rat et public is about to establish a railway across the tontine t, to fill up the intermediate space. It is possible, therefore, thal at no distant date, if things were to continue moving as they are, we might see, as we looked towards the American continent, on our left-hand, south of the 49th parallel of latitude, a splendid re- gion, occupied throughout its extent by settlements under the Republic, gradually forming its territories and states, and pos- sessing all the weight and power of a regularly organized politi- cal, social, and trading community. This people, too, would be that which has shown the most expansive power of any under the sun ; always excepting its relatives by blood, the British Colonies, whose expansive power has again been set free of late years in North America. But, still supposing that things go on only as they are on our right, to the north of that line of latitude, we should see a desert reserved for " nature," as they call it, thinly peopled, administered by the Hudson's Bay Company, but haunted, as No-man's land" is apt to be, by the straggler, the runaway convict, the misanthrope, the outcast of every description; these lawless stragglers being the advanced guard perhaps of the Mor- mons, and of American pioneers not altogether unaetuated by i some desire to play over again the part which they enacted in Texas. Men of this stamp would wish to occupy the land and settle it, and then to claim from their own Republic the protec- tion denied to them by the de jure Sovereign of the soil, who re- fused to exercise the rights, to perform the duties of Sovereign de facto. What might not England forfeit if she permitted this state of things to come about ? We have already indicated the
danger in our paper on the colony of New Caledonia.: we esta- blish the same problem e converse by this proposition of old Hud- sonia.
There is, indeed, a branch of the question even beyond this, and larger. Our country has not yet freed itself from all its un-
easy classes, nor has it yet exhausted the resources of machinery.
The late exhibition at Chester has shown the progress that ma- chinery is making in concentrating human labour ; but if we should need. fewer agricultural hands here, the hands must live ; they must seek wider fields for their more skilful labour, and we possess those fields, to an extent virtually incalculable for this century, in British North America, under a climate congenial to our race, and, we may almost presume, within the distance of a week or ten days from this land. Besides, a vast number of Queen Victoria's subjects are annually pouring out of this coun- try and establishing themselves in the United States, not because they prefer republican government, but because the lands are open, while they are closed in British America. It has been pro- posed in Canada to settle this question by conceding the back territories to it under certain conditions ; but with the reasonable expectation that Canada will decline. One condition alone would suggest such a refusal ; it is, that communication should be esta- blished with the farther districts. Now Canada is not wealthy, she does not possess a surplus revenue, and in British North America settlement has made its advance by a spreading of the circumference onwards. Enterprises of this kind are far more suited to imperial England, or her giant joint-stock companies, than to the rural population of Canada, with its slightly concen- trated federal government.
The Company? no doubt, has " rights " ; let them be ascer- tained, and extinguished in accordance with the dignity of the British Crown and with equity. But one thing is evident : the present Colonial Minister views the subjects in those larger bear- ings, and he has with him an opinion so general, that neither the pressure of Mr. Roebuck, nor the reticence of Mr. Labouchere, could take the matter out of his hands.
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