The education of the more respectable families, particularly those of the Company’s officers, is well provided for at an institution of great merit; the gentleman who presides over it being every way qualified for the important trust.  The different branches of mathematical and classical learning are taught in it; and the school has already produced some excellent scholars.  In addition to the more useful branches of female education, the young ladies are taught music and drawing by a respectable person of their own sex.  Thus we have, in the midst of this remote wilderness of the North-West, all the elements of civilized life; and there are there many young persons of both sexes, well educated and accomplished, who have never seen the civilized world.  There are also thirteen schools for the children of the lower class, supported entirely by the parents themselves.

The Company have here two shops (or stores), well supplied with every description of goods the inhabitants can require; there are besides several merchants scattered through the settlement, some of whom are said to be in easy circumstances.  The Company’s bills constitute the circulating medium, and are issued for the value of from one to twenty shillings.  Of late years, a considerable amount of American specie has found its way into the settlement, probably in exchange for furs clandestinely disposed of by the merchants beyond the line.  The petty merchants import their goods from England by the Company’s ships; an ad valorem duty is imposed on these goods, the proceeds of which are applied to the payment of the constabulary force of the colony.  The Company’s charter invests it with the entire jurisdiction, executive and judicial, of the colony.  The local Governor and Council enact such simple statutes as the primitive condition of the settlement requires; and those enactments have hitherto proved equal to the maintenance of good order.  A court of quarter sessions is regularly held for the administration of justice, and the Company have lately appointed a Recorder to preside over it.  It is gratifying to learn, that this functionary has had occasion to pass judgment on no very flagitious crime since his appointment.

In the work to which I have so frequently referred, it is mentioned, that a “certain market is secured to the inhabitants by the demand for provisions for the other settlements.”  If by “settlements” the miserable trading posts be meant, as it must be, I know not on what grounds such an affirmation is made.  A sure market, forsooth!  A single Scotch farmer could be found in the colony, able alone to supply the greater part of the produce the Company require; there is one, in fact, who offered to do it.  If a sure market were secured to the colonists of Red River, they would speedily become the wealthiest yeomanry in the world.  Their barns and granaries are always full to overflowing; so abundant are the crops, that many of the farmers could subsist for a period of two or even three years, without putting a grain of seed in the ground.  The Company purchase from six to eight bushels of wheat from each farmer, at the rate of three shillings per bushel; and the sum total of their yearly purchases from the whole settlement amounts to—­