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318 ROBERT CARLTON CLARK

forthcoming. The next year, 1844, the Legislative Committee seeing that the government could not be sustained without a revenue imposed a tax on the people and sought to secure its payment by the provision that he who failed to pay should have no benefit from the laws nor be allowed to vote. So drastic a measure did not, however, succeed in producing funds sufficient to pay the upkeep of the new government. The appropriations for the year 1844 were but a little in excess of $900 and the revenues collected by end of year amounted to about one-third of this sum. 4

Though the population of the territory was increasing very rapidly, and its wealth in proportion, and deficiency in rev- enue might in a short time be made up it seemed to many a more speedy solution of the financial difficulty to secure the co-operation of the Hudson's Bay Company and from it and its supporters a payment of the taxes so difficult of collection south of the Columbia. For a wealthy corporation in their very midst, enjoying a large measure of monopoly over their industrial life, to take daily toll of their meager incomes, and to secure the benefits of the peace and order maintained by the government they had established while contributing noth- ing to its support, seemed to the political leaders of the infant state a very real grievance. Every effort ought therefore to be made to persuade the company that it owed a duty to help support a government that brought it such manifest blessings and a community that was to it such an important source of profit. This desire to make the Hudson's Bay Company a direct contributor to the revenues of the new government was to be not the least of the factors in bringing about its union with the Provisional Government.

A further circumstance that was contributing to the estab- lishment of better relations between the officials of the Hud- son's Bay Company and the American settlers who were the leaders in the new organization was the influx of new men from the United States and the consequent changing of the per-

4 Bancroft, Oregon 1 1443.