"The blindest can not long avoid seeing the immense importance of Vancouver Island to Great Britain. Those who, two years ago [1846], first began to attract public attention to this question, are not the less amazed at the unexpected manner and rapidity with which their anticipations have been realized. "Six months ago it was a question merely of colonizing Vancouver Island; now it is a question involving the interests of the whole of British North America, and of the empire of Great Britain in the Pacific Ocean." It is always more or less difficult to trace the course of a false or fictitious object. It becomes peculiarly so when two objects of the same character come up; the one, by long practice and experience, assuming a fair and honorable exterior, having talent, experience, and wealth; the other, an illegitimate production, being called into existence to cripple the energies of two powerful nations, and living under the supreme control of the body, having acquired its position through the ignorance of the nations it seeks to deceive. It is out of the question to separate two such objects or associations. The one is the child of the other, and is permitted to exist while the object to be accomplished remains an opponent to the parent association. The opposition to the fur monopoly having ceased west of the Rocky Mountains, a new element of national aggrandizement and empire comes within the range of this deceitful and grasping association. Its child is immediately christened and set to work under its paternal eye. We have the full history of the progress made by this _Mr. Puget Sound Agricultural Company_ in the testimony of the twenty-seven witnesses summoned to prove his separate existence from that of the _Hudson's Bay Company_. We find, in tracing the existence of these two children of the British empire in North America, that they have established themselves in an island on the Pacific coast called Vancouver. In this island they are more thrifty and better protected than they were in the dominions of Uncle Samuel. Notwithstanding they are comfortably located, and have secured the larger part of that island and the better portion of British Columbia, there is occasionally a British subject that grumbles a little about them in the following undignified style:-- "If the company were to be destroyed to-morrow, would England be poorer? Would there not rather be demanded from the hands of our own manufacturers ten times the quantity of goods which is sent abroad, under the present system, to purchase the skins?" My dear sir, this would make the Indians comfortable and happy. "We boast [says this Englishman] that we make no slaves, none at least that can taint our soil, or fret our sight; but we take the child of the forest, whom God gave us to civilize, and commit him, bound hand and foot, to the most iron of all despotisms--_a commercial monopoly_.