earnest friends, substantial men, and we could, no doubt, have
underwritten the amount. My proportion was got ready; and my personal
friends would have doubled that proportion, or more, if I had wanted
it. I strongly recommended this course. But the Hudson's Bay Company
would give no credit. We must take up the shares as presented and pay
for them over the counter. Thus, the latter alternative was, after some
anxious days, adopted. Mr. Richard Potter was the able negociator in
completing this great transaction, began and carried on as above. The
shares were taken over and paid for by the International Financial
Society, who issued new stock to the public to an amount which covered
a large provision of new capital for extension of business by the
Company, and a profit to themselves and their friends who had taken the
risk of so new and onerous an engagement.

I may finish this section by stating that, as respects the new Hudson's
Bay shareholders, their 20_l_. shares have been reduced by returns
of capital to 13_l_., and having, nevertheless, in the "boom" of
lands in the West, been sold at 37_l_. as the price of the
13_l_.; they are now about 24_l_. Thus, every one who has
held his property, and will continue to hold it, has, and will have, a
safe and unusually profitable investment. These shareholders, besides
the large reserves near their posts, which I shall enumerate later on,
have a claim to one-twentieth of the land where settlements are
surveyed and made. This gives a great future to the investor. On the
other hand, Canada--in place of the Mother Country, to whom the whole
ought to have belonged, for the purposes previously set forth--has
obtained this vast and priceless dominion for a payment of only
300,000_l_., on the award of Earl Granville; and the Pacific
Railway, by reason of that great possession, has been completed and
opened.