spirits were supplied, with frightful results in uproar and violence; but this evil practice has been discontinued or carefully restricted. When the negotiation is concluded, the Indians withdraw and resume their wanderings. The Company supplied such government as the unpeopled continent required. They had many rivals in the lucrative commerce which they carried on, and it was often needful for them to defend by arms their coveted monopoly. The French strove during many years to drive out the English and possess the fur trade. French ships of war appeared in the bay; French soldiers attacked the posts of the Company. Scarcely had those angry debates been silenced by the victory of Wolfe, when a yet more formidable competition arose. [Sidenote: 1784 A.D.] Some enterprising Canadians founded a rival Company, and traded so prosperously that in a few years they had established numerous stations, and possessed themselves of much of the trade which had hitherto been enjoyed by the older Company. Perpetual strife raged between the servants of the rival institutions. Battles were fought; much blood was shed; the revenues of the Hudson Bay Company decayed; its rich dividends wholly ceased. [Sidenote: 1816 A.D.] At length a union of the Companies closed these wasteful feuds, and restored the almost forgotten era of prosperity. For a century and a half from the formation of the Company there was no attempt to colonize the vast region over which its dominion extended. The Englishmen and Scotchmen who occupied the trading-stations were the only civilized inhabitants of the North-West. The stations were in number about one hundred; the entire white population did not exceed one or two thousand. There were stations on the Mackenzie River, within the Arctic circle, where the cold was so intense that hatchets of ordinary temper shivered like glass at the first blow. There were stations on the Labrador coast, and twenty-five hundred miles away from these there were stations on the Pacific. The Company did not desire to carry civilization into this wilderness. The interests of the fur trade are not promoted by civilization. That industry cannot live within sound of the settler’s axe, or where the yellow corn waves in the soft winds of autumn. It prospers only where the silence of the forest is unbroken; where the fertile glebe lies undisturbed by the plough. The Company gave no encouragement to the coming in of human beings, in presence of whom the more profitable occupancy of beaver and bison and silver fox must cease. At length, and for the only time, the traditional policy was departed from. [Sidenote: 1812 A.D.] While the struggle with the rival Company still raged, Lord Selkirk, who was then chairman of the Hudson Bay Company, bethought him of sending out a number of Scotch Highlanders to found a permanent settlement, and thus give preponderance to the interests of which he was the guardian.