Members of the International Financial Association met Berens, Colville--representative of the Selkirk interests--and two other Hudson’s Bay directors in the dark old office of the Board Room, Fenchurch Street, on the 1st of February, in 1862. Watkins describes the room as dingy with faded green cover on the long table and worn dust-grimed chairs. Berens continued to storm like a fishwife; but it was probably part of the game. On June 1, 1863, the International Association bought out the Hudson’s Bay Company for £1,500,000. The Company that had begun in Radisson’s day, two hundred years before, with a capital of $50,000 (£10,000) now sold to the syndicate for $7,500,000, and the stock was resold to new shareholders in a new Hudson’s Bay Company at a still larger capital. The question was what to do about the forty shares belonging to the chief factors and traders. When word of the sale came to them in Canada, they naturally felt as the minority shareholder always feels--that they had been sold out without any compensation, and the indignation in the service was universal. But this injustice was avoided by another unexpected move in the game. While financiers were dickering for Hudson’s Bay stock, Canadian politicians brought about confederation of all the Canadian colonies in 1867, and a clause had been introduced in the British North America Act that it should “be lawful to admit Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories into the Union.” The Hon. William McDougall had introduced resolutions in the Canadian House praying that Rupert’s Land be united in the Confederation. With this end in view, Sir George Cartier and Mr. McDougall proceeded to England to negotiate with the Company. In October, 1869, the new Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished all charter and exclusive rights to the Dominion. The Dominion in turn paid over to the Company £300,000; granted it one-twentieth of the arable land in its territory, and ceded to it rights to the land on which its forts were built. From the £300,000, paid by Canada, £157,055 were set aside to buy out the rights of the wintering partners. How valuable one-twentieth of the arable land was to prove, the Company, itself, did not realize till recent days, and what wealth it gained from the cession of land where its forts stood, may be guessed from the fact that at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) this land comprised five hundred acres of what are now city lots at metropolitan values. Where its forts stood, it had surely won its laurels, for the ground was literally baptized with the blood of its early traders; just as the tax-free sites of rich religious orders in Quebec were long ago won by the blood of Catholic martyrs of whom newcomers knew nothing. Whether the rest of the bargain--the payment of £300,000 for charter rights, which Canadians repudiated, and the cession of one-twentieth of the country’s arable land--were as good a bargain for Canada as for the Hudson’s Bay