"Next day I had a long private interview with Mr. Maynard, but could not see the balance-sheet The same day, I saw the Duke with Messrs. Glyn and Benson." On the following day, the chief promoter spent the forenoon with Mr. Roberts, the accountant, and his son and assistant, at Hudson's Bay House.
"Mr. Roberts told him many odd things," he says; "one was, that the Company had had a freehold farm on the site of the present City of San Francisco of one thousand acres, and had sold it just before the gold discoveries for £1,000, because two factors quarrelled over it. I learnt a great deal of the inside of the affair, and got some glimpses of the competing North-West Company, amalgamated by Mr. Edward Ellice, its chief mover, many years agone, with the Hudson's Bay Company. Pointing to some boxes in his private room one day, Mr. Maynard said, 'There are years of Chancery in those boxes, if anyone else had them.' And he more than once quoted a phrase of the Old Bear, 'My fortune came late in life.'"
The International Financial Association.
In spite of the Duke's indisposition, he expressed the greatest interest in the progress of the negotiations. Yet the prospect of Government aid was now remote. Two ways were open to raise the money for a purchase of the Company's rights—to secure the names and support of fifteen persons, millionaires, for £100,000 each; the other to hand the proposed purchase over to the newly-organized International Finance Association, who were eager to find some important enterprise to put before the public. The first method seemed to recommend itself to the promoters; and the friends of the project could easily have underwritten the necessary amount. But the Company now announced that it would give no credit. "We must take up the shares as presented and pay for them over the counter." There was, therefore, no alternative. Mr. Richard Potter, acting for the capitalists, completed the negotiations. The shares were taken over and paid for by the International Financial Association, who issued new stock to the public to an amount which covered a large provision of new capital for the extension of business by the Company, and at great profit to themselves. As regards the new Hudson's Bay shareholders, their two hundred and one shares were subsequently reduced by returns of capital to one hundred and thirty-one, and having attained a value of thirty-seven, during the "land boom" period twenty years later stood at two hundred and forty-one.
A Hudson's Bay Company prospectus was issued. It was understood that the International Financial Association were merely agents, that the shares would not remain in their hands, but would pass to the proprietors, who would, of course, only enjoy the rights such shares carried. They would, in fact, be a continuation of the Company, only their efforts would be directed to the promotion of the settlement of the country; the development of the postal and transit communications being one of the objects to which they were pledged. A new council had been formed, and amongst its members was Mr. Eden Colville, one of the old committee, whom the Duke praised publicly in the highest terms, as a "man of business and good sense."
There was one man in London who was astonished at what had taken place. Edward Ellice still lived, but his commanding figure was bent by the weight of years. As we have seen, it was he who, in 1821, played the principal part in the amalgamation of the rival companies. He had grown to be proud of the Company, proud of its history, of its traditions, of its service; and he seemed to detect in this transfer, its fall. A few months before his death, in 1863, he met one of the negotiators at Burlington House. He confronted him for some moments without speaking, in a state of abstraction. Then he passed on, like a man "endeavouring to recollect a long history of difficulty, and to realize how strangely it had all ended."
Ellice had said, before the Parliamentary Committee of 1857, in reply to a question put by a member as to what probability there was of a settlement being made, "within what you consider to be the southern territories of the Hudson's Bay Company?" "None; in the lifetime of the youngest man now alive!"
