Lord Selkirk took this experience greatly to heart. However much to be regretted is the failure of {19} sufficient courage and faith to enable one to stand strong, "and having done all, still to stand," before a flagrant injustice or the pain of misconception, it is yet hardly to be wondered at that a sensitive spirit, conscious of its own integrity and unmeasured good-will, falters and faints before so unfortunate an experience. To the Scottish Earl it seems to have been more than he could endure. In 1818 he returned to Scotland, and soon after died, at the early age of forty-nine, in Pau, having gone to southern France in search of renewed health. The Red River settlement that he founded was in the neighbourhood of the present city of Winnipeg. Historians differ, however, as to the motives of Lord Selkirk, some authorities taking a view quite opposite to the one cited here, and gathered, too, from trustworthy sources. The truth may lie somewhere between the two extremes. It is as unnecessary as it would be futile to endeavour to invest every leader of a movement with a golden halo like that of the mediæval saints of the Quattrocentisti. The world's progress has always been carried forward by mixed forces and both ideas and institutions owe their vitality to complex aims and to a variety of conditions. In the spring of 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Companies united. This marked an epoch in Canadian progress; and in 1838 occurred another event, unnoted as of any significance at the time, yet which proved to be the advent of one of the {20} greatest of the creative forces of Canada. "Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots," says George Eliot, "sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our _dramatis personæ_ folded in her hand." Surely the arrival at Montreal of a Scottish lad of seventeen years of age could hardly be held as bearing any direct relation to the future development and the cosmopolitan importance of Canada. Yet what a romance of history lies between the unnoticed landing of Donald A. Smith, in 1838, and the solemn grandeur of the scene in Westminster Abbey, in January of 1914, when representatives of the Crown, with the peers, the statesmen, the scholars, the social leaders of London; with a great concourse drawn from all ranks, met for the memorial service for Donald Alexander Smith, first Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal. "The memory of ten centuries of England's illustrious dead haunted the scene."