must listen quietly to the end. Perhaps at the last you may see more
clearly than you do now.

"This old Company of yours has been established for a great many
years. Back in old days, over two centuries ago, it pushed up into
this wilderness to trade for its furs. That you know. And then it
explored ever farther to the west and the north, until its servants
stood on the shores of the Pacific and the stretches of the Arctic
Ocean. And its servants loved it. Enduring immense hardships, cut off
from their kind, outlining dimly with the eye of faith the structure
of a mighty power, they loved it always. Thousands of men were in its
employ, and so loyal were they that its secrets were safe and its
prestige was defended, often to a lonely death. I have known the
Company and its servants for a long time, and if I had leisure I could
instance a hundred examples of devotion and sacrifice beside which
mere patriotism would seem a little thing. Men who had no country
cleaved to her desolate posts, her lakes and rivers and forests; men
who had no home ties felt the tug of her wild life at their hearts;
men who had no God bowed in awe before her power and grandeur. The
Company was a living thing.

"Rivals attempted her supremacy, and were defeated by the
steadfastness of the men who received her meagre wages and looked to
her as their one ideal. Her explorers were the bravest, her traders
the most enterprising and single-minded, her factors and partners the
most capable and potent in all the world. No country, no leader, no
State ever received half the worship her sons gave her. The fierce
Nor'westers, the traders of Montreal, the Company of the X Y, Astor
himself, had to give way. For, although they were bold or reckless or
crafty or able, they had not the ideal which raises such qualities to