What will Selkirk, himself, make out of this grant? Then Alexander MacKenzie tells of agents going the rounds of Scotland to gather subscribers at £100 a piece to a joint stock land company of 200 shares. This land company is to send people out to Red River, either as servants to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which is to pay them £20 a year in addition to a free grant of one hundred acres, or as bona fide settlers who purchase the land outright at a few pence an acre. The servants will be sent out on free passage. The settlers must pay £10 ship money. It needed no prophet to foretell fortune to the shareholders of the land company by the time settlers enough had come out to increase the value of the grant. This and more, the six Nor’Westers argue at the General Court of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the hot debate over Selkirk’s scheme. To the Nor’Westers, Selkirk, the dreamer, with his head in the clouds and his vision set on help to the needy and his feet treading roughshod over the privileges of fur traders--to the Nor’Westers this Selkirk is nothing but a land speculator, a stock jobber, gambling for winnings. But the chairman, Governor Mainwaring, calls the debaters to order. The Selkirk scheme is put to the vote. To a man the Hudson’s Bay Company shareholders declare for it. To a man there vote against it all those Nor’Westers who have bought Hudson’s Bay stock, except the two whose purchase was made but a week before: £29,937 of stock for Selkirk, £14,823 against him. By a scratch of the pen he has received an empire larger than the British Isles. Selkirk believed that he was lord of this soil as truly as he was proprietor of his Scottish estates, where men were arrested as poachers when they hunted. “_The North-West Company must be compelled to quit my lands_,” he wrote on March 31, 1816, “_especially my post at the forks. As it will be necessary to use force, I am anxious this should be done under legal warrant._” “_You must give them_ (the Northwest Company) _solemn warning_,” he writes his agent, “_that the land belongs to the Hudson’s Bay Company. After this warning, they should not be allowed to cut any timber either for building or fuel. What they have cut should be openly and forcibly seized and their buildings destroyed. They should be treated as poachers. We are so fully advised of the unimpeachable validity of these rights of property, there can be no scruple in enforcing them when you have the physical means._” It was the tragic mistake of a magnificent life that Selkirk attempted to graft the feudalism of an old order on the growing democracy of a New World. That his conduct was inspired by the loftiest motives only renders the mistake doubly tragic. Odd trick of destiny! The man who sought to build up a feudal system in the Northwest, was the man who forever destroyed the foundations of feudalism in America. * * * * *