of a startling character had come over the time-honoured company, which sold out to a new company in 1863, being merged into, or rather merging into itself, an organization known as “The Anglo-International Financial Association,” which included several prominent American capitalists.  The old name was retained, but everything else was to be changed.  The policy of exclusion was to cease, immigration was to be encouraged, and a telegraph line built through the Territories to the Pacific coast.  The wire for this was actually shipped, and lay in Rupert’s Land for years, until made use of by the Mackenzie Administration in the building of the Government telegraph line, which followed the railway route defined by Sir Sandford Fleming.  The old Hudson’s Bay Company’s shares, of a par value of half a million pounds sterling, were increased to a million and a half under the new adjustment, and were thrown upon the market in shares of twenty pounds sterling each.  Sir Edmund Head, an old ex-Governor of Canada, was made Governor of the new company.  The Stock Exchange was not altogether favourable, and the remaining shares were only sold in the Winnipeg land boom of 1881.

The alien element in the new company seemed to inspire the politicians of the United States with surpassing hopes and ideas.  An offer to purchase its territorial interests was made in January, 1866, by American capitalists, which was not unfavourably glanced at by the directorate.  It was capped later on.  The corollary of the proposal was a bill, actually introduced into the United States Congress in July following, and read twice, “providing for the admission of the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East and Canada West, and for the organization of the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan and Columbia.”  The bill provided that “The United States would pay ten millions of dollars to the Hudson’s Bay Company in full of all claims to territory or jurisdiction in North America, whether founded on the Charter of the Company, or any treaty, law, or usage.”  The grandiosity, to use a mild phrase, of such a measure needs no comment.  But though it seems amusing to the Canadian of to-day, it was by no means a joke forty years ago.  As a matter of fact, the then most uninhabited Territories, cut off from the centres of Canadian activity by a wilderness of over a thousand miles, would have been invaded by Fenians and filibusters but for the fact that they were a part of the British Empire.  An attempt at this was indeed made at a later date.  This possibility was afterwards formulated, evidently as a threat, by Senator Charles Sumner during the “Alabama Claims” discussion, in his astonishing memorandum to Secretary Fish.  “The greatest trouble, if not peril,” he said, “is from Fenianism, which is excited by the British flag in Canada.  Therefore, the withdrawal of the British flag cannot be abandoned as a preliminary of such a settlement as is now proposed.  To make the settlement complete the withdrawal should be from this hemisphere, including provinces and islands.”  A refreshing proposition, truly!