The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-21 00:00:00

THE SON, LONvo

lieve the nation may at last recognise the inevit-
able Destroyer of that long effete Monopoly—the
death-blow has already been stricken, the doom of
the Company has already been pronounced.
As many as ten years ago we wrote in the
columns of this journal, on the 26th of June, 1849,
in reference to the then recent acquisition of Qua-
dra by the company, for the period of that very
decade which has since then elapsed—

" It was the circumstance of WILLIAM RUFUS preclud-
ing the possibility of anything like agricultural progress in
the largest and most fruitful portions of Hampshire (the
New Forest), that imparted to his reign an air of such
savage austerity. Yet, what WILLIAM RUFUS did to a
portion of a new province of his dominion, at a time when
that dominion entented no further than beyond the boun-
dary line of the Grampians and the shores of England, the
Hudson's Bay Company have done (and that too in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries !) to half of a vast con-

tinent like the northern continent of America. What
WILLIAM Rurus did for the sake of the manly sport of
hunting, the Hudson's Bay Company have been, and are,
doing for the sake of so much profit as traders I Let them
draw a warning, in the shape of a deduction, from the
annals of their native country I Let them remember how
the second WILLIAM fell a victim to his inordinate passion
for sport I And let them beware lest they may find them-
selves destroyed by some Parliamentary Sir WALTER
TYRREiL ! 'Unless they be absolutely blinded by their
avarice as speculators, by their greed of emolument, by
their lust of an exorbitant per centage in profit, they will
yield before their barbarous and extortionate proceedings
have driven the country to desperation; they will, in par-
ticular, shrink from the ridicule attached to those who emu-
late the fabulous dog dropping the substance to snatch at
the shadow. To them, we are satisfied that Vancouver's
Island will prove nothing more than a shadow, a shadow
reflected, to their avaricious eyes, in the waters of Nootka
Sound. Even now, in this early stage of the proceeding.,
when the ink is scarcely yet dry upon the document which
consigns Quadra to their dominion, the effect is beginning
to manifest itself in a detestation of their barbarous system,
which must inevitably tend, at last, to undermine the whole
superstructure of their sway in North America."
What we thus wrote on Tuesday, the 26th of
June, 1849, we now distinctly reiterate on Friday,
the 21st of January, 1859. And we ask if every
syllable we penned more than ten years ago, has
not, in the interval that has since '.iapsed, been in
every particular justified? The odium, long ago
inspired, in this regard, by the Hudson's Bay Com-
pany, hasbeen matured, by reason of their ten years'
occupancy of Quadra, to the present climax of
detestation as to their sway generally upon the
North American continent. Vancouver's Island
has melted from them like the shadow we predicted.
For snatching at that shadow they are now losing
the substance of which they had previously so long
held possession. And as the disaster foreshadowed
by our reference to the fate of the Red King—have
not the rulers of the Company at length found
themselves brought face to face with a " Parlia-
mentary Sir WALTER TYRRELL " in the creator of
British Columbia ? And as we do confidently hope,
Sir EDWARD LYTTON will yet prove himself to be
the regenerator of the whole of the vast sweep of
our British North American possessions.