In 1808 though inactive he showed his bent by buying up Hudson’s Bay Company stock.  During this time projects in agriculture, the condition of the poor, the safety of the country, and the spread of civilization constantly occupied his active mind.  The Napoleonic war cut off the vast cornfields of America from England, and as a great historian shows was followed by a terrible pauperization of the laboring classes.

There is no trace of a desire for aggrandizement, for engaging in the fur trade, or for going a-field on plans of speculation in the mind of Lord Selkirk.  The feuds of the two branches of the Montreal Fur traders—­the Old Northwest and the New Northwest—­which were apparently healed in the year after the Colonization of Prince Edward Island, were not ended between the two factions of the united company led by McTavish—­called the Premier—­on the one hand and Sir Alexander Mackenzie on the other.

During these ten years of the century, the Hudson’s Bay Company had also established rival posts all over the country.  The competition at times reached bloodshed, and financial ruin was staring all branches of the fur trade in the face.

It was the depressed condition of the fur trade and the consequent drop in Hudson’s Bay Company shares that appealed to Lord Selkirk, the man of many dreams and imaginations and he saw the opportunity of finding a home under the prairie skies for his hapless countrymen.  It requires no detail here of how Lord Selkirk bought a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stock, made out his plans of Emigration, and took steps to send out his hoped-for thousands or tens of thousands of Highland crofters, or Irish peasants, whoever they might be, if they sought freedom though bound up with hardship, hope instead of a pauper’s grave, the prospect of independence of life and station in the new world instead of penury and misery under impossible conditions of life at home.  Nor is it a matter of moment to us, how the struggle began until we have brought before our minds the stalwart figure of Sir Alexander Mackenzie—­Lord Selkirk’s great protagonist.  Like many a distinguished man who has made his mark in the new world, and notably our great Lord Strathcona, who came as a mere lad to Canada, Alexander Mackenzie, a stripling of sixteen, arrived in Montreal to make his fortune.  He was born as the Scottish people say of “kenn’t” of “well-to-do” folk in Stornoway, in the Hebrides.  He received a fair education and as a boy had a liking for the sea.  Two partners, Gregory and McLeod, were fighting at Montreal in opposition to the dominant firm of McTavish and Frobisher.  Young Alexander Mackenzie joined this opposition.  So great was his aptitude, that boy as he was, he was despatched West to lead an expedition to Detroit.  Soon he was pushed on to be a bourgeois, and was appointed at the age of twenty-two to go to the far West fur country of Athabasca, the vast Northern country which