Company, I must leave to be discussed by the writer who takes up the story where I leave off. Certainly both sides have made tremendous gains from the bargain. * * * * * A year later, Red River Settlement came into Confederation under the name which Spence had given the country of his Provisional Government--Manitoba, “the country of the people of the lakes.” So passed the Company as an empire builder. In Oregon, its passing was marked by the terrible conflagration of Indian massacres. In British Columbia, the old order gave place to the new in a wild gold stampede. In Manitoba, the monopoly had not been surrendered before Riel put a match to the inflammable passions of his wild Plain Rangers, that set the country in a flame. As for the Company, it had played its part, and its day was done. On that part, I have no verdict. Its history is its verdict, and it is only fair to judge it by the codes of feudalism rather than democracy. Judging by the codes of feudalism, there are few baronial or royal houses of two hundred years’ reign with as little to blush for or hide away among family skeletons as the “Gentlemen Adventurers Trading to Hudson’s Bay.” Trickery? To be sure; but then, it was an old order fighting a new, an old fencer trying to parry the fancy thrusts of an enemy with a new style of sword play. The old order was Feudalism. The new was Democracy. The Company’s ships still ply the waters of the North. Its canoe brigades still bring in the furs to the far fur posts. Its mid-winter dog trains still set the bells tinkling over the lonely wastes of Northern snows and it still sells as much fur at its great annual sales as in its palmiest days. But the Hudson’s Bay Company is no longer a gay Adventurer setting sail over the seas of the Unknown. It is no longer a Soldier of Fortune, with laugh for life or death carving a path through the wilderness. It is now but a commercial organization with methods similar to other money-getting companies. Free traders over-run its hunting grounds. Rivals as powerful as itself are now on the field fighting the battle of competition according to modern methods of business rivalry. Three-quarters of its old hunting fields are already carved up in the checker-board squares of new provinces and fenced farm patches. The glories of the days of its empire as Adventurer, as Soldier of Fortune, as Pathfinder, as Fighter, as Gamester of the Wilderness--have gone forever to that mellow Golden Age of the Heroic Past.