Page:Two speeches of Robert R. Torrens, Esq., M.P., on emigration, and the colonies.djvu/24

20 transactions, well within the memory of the House, afforded ample material for his purpose. He would begin with the Red River difficulty as the most recent.

The Papers laid on the Table proved great care and masterly statesmanship on the part of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies in bringing to a conclusion the negotiations which had been so long pending between the Hudson's Bay Company and the Dominion Government for the cession to the latter of the North-West country. The pecuniary obligations and interests of the high contracting parties had been most carefully attended to. He also observed a laudable consideration for the interests of the aboriginal tribes. But there were others of Her Majesty's subjects nearer in blood, and who, from their numbers as well as from the progress they had made in settling the country, were entitled to be called into counsel on a matter vitally affecting their interests; yet the very existence of these settlers, numbering some 20,000 souls, appeared to have been ignored throughout the negotiations, unless, indeed, he assumed that they were the "third parties" referred to in Part 3 of the Memorandum addressed by Mr. M'Dougall, on the 28th December last, to the Governor General of Canada, which, as it was very brief, he would read—

"That your Excellency will be pleased to express to his Grace, as the opinion of the Canadian Government, that it is highly expedient that the transfer which the Imperial Parliament has authorized, and the Canadian Parliament approved, should not be delayed by negotiations or correspondence with private or third parties, whose position, opinions, and claims have heretofore embarrassed both Governments in dealing with this question."

Admitting that the North American Act of 1867, which in Section 146 sanctioned the incorporation in the Dominion of the then outstanding Colonies upon Addresses of their respective Legislatures to Her Majesty, ordained also that Rupert's Land, not having a separate Legislature, might be incorporated upon Address to Her Majesty by the Parliament of Canada alone; still that provision did not appear to contemplate, still less to sanction, the extinguishment of the inherent common-law rights of these 20,000 British subjects to be allowed a voice in the settlement of their local government and taxation and to have their rights and privileges secured, before the ratification of the transfer of themselves and lands to the absolute sovereignty of another settlement, from which they were divided by a vast desert, and with which they had little communication. Their expectations do not appear to have been at all unreasonable. They