Accordingly, when the Canadian Government deemed the time was ripe, two members of that Government, the Hon. Sir George E. Cartier and the Hon. William McDougall, were sent to London to negotiate with the Imperial authorities for the transfer of the North-West to Canada. In view of the attitude taken by the Hudson's Bay Company, as stated above, the matter was not difficult to arrange. And after a brief discussion in London, the famous old fur-trading organization, which had held charter rights since the days of Charles II, relinquished those rights to the Imperial Government for L300,000 sterling, certain reservations around their trading posts, along with one-twentieth of the land in the fertile belt. Then, as previously understood, the Imperial Government was to transfer the vast North-West to Canada, which in turn undertook to respect and conserve the rights of the people in the area thus added to the Dominion. This arrangement was concluded in the spring of 1869, and it was then expected that the purchase money would be paid on the 1st of October following, and that probably on the 1st of December the Queen's Proclamation would issue, setting forth these facts and fixing the date of the actual transfer to Canada. So far all was well. The ideas leading up to the acquisition of this great domain were in every sense statesmanlike, and, if carefully carried out, were calculated to be of the greatest benefit to the people in the new territory and the Dominion as well. We should pay unstinted tribute to the men whose ideals were for an ever-widening horizon, and who felt that "no pent-up Utica should confine the powers" of the young nation just beginning to stretch out and exercise its potentially giant limbs. Once the older Provinces in the East were brought into Confederation it was wise to look forward to a Canada stretching from ocean to ocean, and to take the necessary legal steps to secure the broad acres of the West as part of the Dominion. But just when everything seemed to be going well a cog in the diplomatic equipment of the Canadian Government power-house slipped and taking advantage of the occasion, one Louis Riel, the son of the old hot-headed agitator on the Red River, threw a wrench into the machinery. The Canadian authorities who wisely carried through the negotiations with the Hudson's Bay Company and the Imperial Government seem to have blundered by overlooking the fact that the new territory had within its borders some 10,000 people, apart from the Indians, who ought to have been informed in some official way of the bargain that was being made, and of the steps that were being taken to conserve the rights and privileges of these early settlers.