The Earl proposed to find a number of effective men as servants to the Hudson's Bay Company in return for a grant of land, viz., two hundred men for ten years, from 1812, who would every year be ready to embark between May 1st and July 1st at an appointed place in Scotland. The Company were to pay wages to each man not exceeding £20. Should the Earl fail, he agreed to forfeit £10 per man short of two hundred. As to proposed grants of land to settlers, two hundred acres were to be given to labourers or artificers; one thousand acres to a master of a trading-house. The Company were, of course, to have full rights of access to all the surrendered districts. [Sidenote: Earl Selkirk's proposal accepted.] The customs duties, exports and imports, payable by settlers were not to exceed five per cent, at Port Nelson, unless it happened that a higher duty was levied at Quebec. The duties so to be levied were to be applied to the expense of Government police, communication between Lake Winnipeg and Port Nelson, etc., and not to be taken as profits for the Company. The show of hands was in favour of the proposal; but a protest was handed in to the Governor by Thwaytes and others. In spite of this, on the 13th of June, the deed was signed, sealed and delivered by the secretary on behalf of the Company. The lands were defined by deed as situate between 52° 30' north latitude and 102° 30' west longitude, a map being affixed to the deed. In reading this protest, one who was ignorant of the true state of affairs would have been led to believe that the partners concerned had no object so dear to them as the welfare and prosperity of the Hudson's Bay Company. These gentlemen appeared to be animated by the most thorough devotion and zeal, as they stood together declaiming in loud, earnest tones against the errors into which their beloved Company was falling, and pouring out their sympathy to the emigrant settlers who might be lured to their destruction by establishing themselves on the lands so granted "out of reach," to employ their own phrase, "of all those aids and comforts which are derived from civil society;" and so it did truly appear to many then as it has done since. But let us examine those signatures, and lo, the wolf obtrudes himself basking in the skin of a lamb! The grant was thus confirmed. The opposition had found itself powerless, and Selkirk was put into possession of a territory only 5,115 square miles less than the entire area of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[93]