AN EMPIRE-BUILDER.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 11 October 1913, Page 9

AN EMPIRE-BUILDER.

"No one will doubt/ writes the author of an article in "the Quarterly Review, tor LBi6, "that Lord Selkirk is an amiable, honorable, and intelligent man —but he has the misfortune to be a projector. \ve are persuaded, however, tnat his are not the deep-laid schemes or a sordid, narrow-minued calculator, out the suggestions of an ardent imagination and a benevolent heart- aueh as are apt sometimes to overlook diificulties wnich it is not easy to overleap. '' (Jontemporary judgments are not seldom ' reversed when the heat of party passion or the vehemence of. interested motive have given place to the dispassionate and balanced criticism of posterity. But with the exception of a tew American professors, more concerned with abstract principles of democracy than with historical accuracy, few students will be disposed to question the truth of the reviewer's estimate of Selkirk's character. It was at once his glory and his misfortune to have been' a projector—his glory because the projects conceived in his fertile and imaginative brain were in the end successful, added a new province to the British Empire, and were instrumental in the opening of vast and fertile territories; his misfortune because their author was hurried into an early grave by the disasters of the opening campaigns and the bitter and unrelenting spite of his mercenery opponents. Like a greater man—Cecil Rhodes —Selkirk may be said to have thought, if not in continents, at least in provinces, and to have placed his hand as firmly upon the map of Western America as did the great Africander upon the map of Southern Africa. Like Rhodes he was regarded by many of his contemporaries us somewhat of an adventurer—with this difference, that whereas Rhodes was the embodiment of .successful and aspiring democracy, Selkirk was looked upon as the personification bf unsuccessful and expiring aristocracy. "His intentions," writes the reviewer, "were, no doubt, benevolent and humane; but an impulse was supposed to be given to them by the ruling passion of reviving, in North America, that species of feudal system which was finally extinguished in North Britain about seventy years since. His lordship was thought to be ambitious of becoming the head of a clan—the chieftain—and founder of numerous families. For such expansive views an island was too confined a sphere; but the neighboring continent had all the requisites that could possibly be wished—an indefinite extent of territory, abounding in roads and plains, and extensive lakes, and navigable rivers; with a soil capable of affording subsistence for millions." Like Rhodes he had the supreme merit of forcing a wedge athwart the path of ambitious rivals. Rhodes dro%re his wedge from south to north and gathered territories in the centre of the land of eternal mysteries. Selkirk placed his barrier across the way of the fiir-tradei's and created ,an agricultural province where his opponents would have had nought but peltries. But Rhodes fortunately lived to see many of his cherished schemes accomplished, whilst Selkirk died ere his infant colony had successfully overcome i*"s preliminary trials and long before Western Canada had ripened into a golden cornfield. A few miserable bushels of grain were aH that the harassed settlers garnered before Selkirk was himself gathered in the Greater Harvest. Thomas Douglas, fifth Earl of, Selkirk, was born in 1771 at St. Mary's I Isle at the mouth of the Dee in Kirkcudbrightshire. As the second son he could not expect to succeed to the family honors and for this reason his education was probably of a more liberal character than was then deemed essential for those whom nature and the law of entail designed for a comfortable inheritance. Inheriting the valor of the Douglas and the impetuosity of the house of; Angus, at an early period he gave promise of great achievement and at the end of his career at the University of Edinburgh he was recognised as a man of liberal and advanced ideas, sympathising with all movements for tHe amelioration of the conditions under which his countrymen lived and labored,- and imbued with an ardent determination to use his great abilities and influence for the furtherance of charitable objects. The death of his eldest brother, Lord Daer, and his own succes- i sion to the Selkirk Earldom two years later placed in his hands the means for carrying out his schemes. Although a lowlander he had become attached to the highlands and glens of the north of Scotland and deeply sympathised with the misfortunes of his countrymen who were suffering from the economic experiments of the great landholders in their endeavors to develop their estates by diminishing the number of small and unprofitable holdings. Whatever blame may be attached to Lord Selkirk for the disasters that subsequently overwhelmed so many of those who were removed to the wilds of Caanda —due to insufficient knowledge of the real conditions of the country to which they were transported and the hostility of vested interests — no one now questions the sincerity and philanthropy of the nobleman who shouldered so grievous a burden on behalf of his fellow-countrymen. Such emigration as then existed was directed in the main to the United States; Selkirk, with a wide patriotism which we in these days of practical Imperialism can fully appreciate, desired to direct the flow of population to lands under the British flag. He sought to relieve the economic pressure of his own country by creating richer and better settlements in new and undeveloped territories. His first attempt to divert the stream of emigration which was flowing from the highlands to the United States was only in part successful, and the colony of eight hundred persons, mostly from the Isle of Skye, which was settled in Prince Edward's Island only slowly increased in numbers and did not lead to any large migration from the Mother Country. But during his visit to the colony in' I^o3 Sel'-ii'-k took the opportunity of visiting Montreal and Toronto, not for "spying out," as was afterwards asserted, the trade of the fur merchants, but for investigating the local conditions and learning what he could of the great western lands which even then he regarded as the site for new colonies. With prophetic vision he elaborated a project, of Empire which was subsequently to have such far-reaching results; and a visit to the United States, where .he witnessed and deplored the loss to the Empire of Britons who were living under a foreign flag, encouraged him to persevere in his efforts. At the beginning of the nineteenth centuiy only an abounding faith and a keen and lively imagination coiild see in the vast rolling prairies of Western Canada anything more than an immenso field for hunters and trappers or an untrodden wilderness too far from the confines of civilisation to be of practical use for economic settlement. Only seven years previously the western plains had been crossed and the Rockies surmounted for the first time by a white man. Beyond a narrow circle of fur traders, who were loath to invite immigration by spreading favorable reports, very little was known about the prairie country.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who subse-. quently became Selkirk's great protagonist, had reorganised the Nortn-WesU Company and had returned to Scotland^ in 1608 where he maintained an activeinterest in the afEairs of the Montreal traders. But Mackenzie, who by his> brilliant journeys had been one of the» first to direct attention to the unknown West, bitterly opposed the colonisation, scnemes or' .Seikirs. The latter had been, slowly e'aborating his plan'for an agricultural settlement beyond the region of the Great Lakes. With .statesmanlike* prevision he realised that so long as the* fur-trading companies remained supremo the enormous territories on both siaes of the ill-defined boundary line of Canada, would be closed against free settlement. Silently and unostentatiously, before hisrivals became aware of his intentions, ho secured a oontro'iing interest in the* Hudson Bay Company, obtained a grantof one hundred and ten thousand square* miles —about twice the size of England and Wales—from the lands whicn trieeompany claimed as theirs by virtue of their charter from Charles J. 1., collected his first party of emigrants, and. transported "them across the ocean and from the shores of Hudson Bay to the* * Red River Settlement. The story of the* new colony,, its trials and vicissitudes, the long and stubborn fight against incredible hardships and difficulties, the? unrelenting warfare with the official* and merchants of the North-west Company which led to murder and massacre, the prolonged economic struggle which, was only really ended when communication with the new colony had become a matter of hours instead of weeks, forma, one of the most romantic and moving episodes in the fascinating annals ot Canadian history. But neither dates, nor events are requisite in a short account of Selkirk. Two broad facts em-, e'rge from the details of the moving; " story. Selkirk, by obtaining his grant from the Hudson Bay Company and settling ins agricultural colony in the midst of the preserves of the fur traders, had introduced a new element amongst the roving population of the West, which was destined to change the course of Canadian history. He had obliterated the word stagnation and had written in Hold characters the word progress upon, the map of Western Canada. Gradually, as settlement spread from the nucleus on the Red River the fur traders conceded the prairies to the pioneers of a. new age, towns replaced the old furtrading posts, and cities sprang up where the buffalo had roamed in countless numbers. The second fact is that it was Selkirk alone who initiated and carried out this reform. It,could not have been delayed for long; but nevertheless his. grim determination, his intrepid courage* in facing alone not only the calmunies. and insults of a host of .enemies but also their active and hostile opposition, his generosity in using his ample patrimony to defeat the machinations of hia enemies by constantly introducing new settlers to* replace those who had been driven away from their prairies are the admiration of all who are opposed ta monopoly. It is easy to write of Selkirk, as haa been done recently, as "a very thrifty Scotch nobleman, much inclined to 'safe* speculation (i.e. when ho possessed-sucht inside information rs w~ Id not merely secure him from loss, but assure him ample profit)"; b"t it is possible so to dismiss contemptuously from the pages of history one who, careless of hia own life, couM leave his comfortable fcome and undertake the then difficult journey from Montreal to the Red ' | River in order to brirg succour to his harassed rl?r>endents and to comfort t^em br his presence. On the contrarythere is "ni versa I testimony to> the svi"f>rity and zeal of Lord Selkirk. Sir WjiHer Scott, writing in 1819. when . Selkirk was worn "to a shadow by the> tr-vihles thot. had attended his enter— « ;-i anc i ivjis almost destroyed by the "■■' iflictivo spite of his enemies, states that "T never knew in my life a man of Tvore generous and disinterested disposition, or or"1 whose taints and perseverance v'r>'-a l.n^-xr qualified to brinp- great and national schemes to conclusion, t hnve o*ll v to regret m common with his <^+.her friends the impediments that have been thrown in his way lv- T the rapacious nvni-ino of t^i*; great compare." Nothing 1 need bp addM to this opinion save the +«?m7er and affectionate words of a writer ii t^e Gentleman's Mao-azine after W* f'enth in 182 A— 'To his friends the I death oF this heloved and eminent perf=nn i s a loss which nothing can repair. His sr^n+le one! condescending manners themsolve* round the hearts of +>r><!G adrr.itted to his society and conciliated an attachment ■which over-? fre'.^i interview served to confirm." Snrelv a fit epitaph to be inscribed over the-lonely rvave, at Pan, in the south of France, of one who may instlv be as the pionpar of imrrnavation into tl»e "TlO+, Wp^em +"T-rito-"i"i= of Canada. — P. E. Lswiiv, on United Empire.