To every age its dreamer! Radisson had dreamed of becoming a voyageur to far countries; and his dream was realized in finding the Great Northwest. Iberville’s ambition was to be conqueror, and he drenched the New World with the blood that was the price of this ambition; and now comes on the scene the third great actor of Northwest drama, a figure round whom swings the new era, a dreamer of dreams, too, but who cares not a farthing for discovery or conquest, whose dream--marvel of marvels--is neither gain nor glory, but the phantom thing men call--Good! Born in 1771, Selkirk came to his title in 1779, and in 1807 married the daughter of James Colville, one of the heaviest shareholders in the Hudson’s Bay Company. All that life could give the young nobleman possessed, wealth, position, love, power. But he possessed something rarer than these--a realizing sense that in proportion as he was possessed of much, so much was he debtor to humanity. During his youth great poverty existed in Scotland. Changes in farming methods had driven thousands of humble tenants from the means of a livelihood. Alexander MacKenzie’s voyages had keenly interested Selkirk. Here, in Scotland, were multitudes of people destitute for lack of land. There, in the vast regions MacKenzie described, was an empire the size of Europe idle for lack of people. Young Selkirk’s imagination took fire. Here was avenue for that passion to help others, which was the mainspring of his life. He would lead these destitute multitudes of Scotland--Earth’s Dispossessed--to this Promised Land of MacKenzie’s voyages. The one fact that Selkirk failed to take into consideration was--how the fur traders, how the lust of gain, would regard this aim of his. He addresses a memorial to the British Government on the subject, which the British Government ignores with a stolid ignorance characteristic of all its dealings in colonial affairs. “It appears,” says Selkirk, “that the greatest impediment to a colony would be the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly.”