This view of the question is sustained by the reply of Sir James Douglas to Mr. Ogden, by Mr. Ogden's course and treatment of the Indians on his way up the Columbia River, his letters to Revs. E. Walker and Spalding, his special instructions to the Indians, and payment of presents in war materials for their captives, and the course pursued by Sir James Douglas in refusing supplies to the provisional troops and settlers, and the enormous supplies of ammunition furnished to the priests for the Indians during the war of 1847-8. We are decidedly of the same opinion respecting that company as their own British writer, who, in conclusion, after giving us a history of 281 pages, detailing one unbroken course of oppression and cruelty to all under their iron despotism, says:-- "The question at issue is a serious one,--whether a valuable territory shall be given up to an _irresponsible corporation_, to be colonized or not, as it may suit their convenience; or whether that colonization shall be conducted in accordance with any principles which are recognized as sound and right?" We can easily see the connection in the principle of right in paying any portion of either of the monstrous claims of that company, which never has been responsible to any civilized national authority. "The foregoing exposure of the character and conduct of the company has been provoked. When doubts were expressed whether the company were qualified for fulfilling the tasks assigned to them by the Colonial Minister, and when they appealed to their character and history, it became right that their history should be examined, and their character exposed. "The investigation thus provoked has resulted in the discovery that their _authority is fictitious, and their claims invalid_. As their power is illegal, so the exercise of it has been mischievous; it has been mischievous to Great Britain, leaving her to accomplish, at a vast national expense, discoveries which the company undertook, and were paid to perform; and because our trade has been _contracted_ and crippled, without any advantage, political or otherwise, having been obtained in return; it has been mischievous to the native Indians, cutting them off from all communication with the rest of the civilized world, depriving them of the fair value of their labor, keeping them in a condition of slavery, and leaving them in the same state of poverty, misery, and paganism in which it originally found them; it has been mischievous to the settlers and colonists under its influence, depriving them of their liberties as British subjects, frustrating, by exactions and arbitrary regulations, their efforts to advance, and, above all, undermining their loyalty and attachment to their mother country, and fostering, by bad government, a spirit of discontent with their own, and sympathy with foreign institutions."