The
shares were taken over and paid for by the International Financial
Society, who issued new stock to the public to an amount which covered
a large provision of new capital for extension of business by the
Company, and a profit to themselves and their friends who had taken the
risk of so new and onerous an engagement.
I may finish this section by stating that, as respects the new Hudson's
Bay shareholders, their 20_l_. shares have been reduced by returns
of capital to 13_l_., and having, nevertheless, in the "boom" of
lands in the West, been sold at 37_l_. as the price of the
13_l_.; they are now about 24_l_. Thus, every one who has
held his property, and will continue to hold it, has, and will have, a
safe and unusually profitable investment. These shareholders, besides
the large reserves near their posts, which I shall enumerate later on,
have a claim to one-twentieth of the land where settlements are
surveyed and made. This gives a great future to the investor. On the
other hand, Canada--in place of the Mother Country, to whom the whole
ought to have belonged, for the purposes previously set forth--has
obtained this vast and priceless dominion for a payment of only
300,000_l_., on the award of Earl Granville; and the Pacific
Railway, by reason of that great possession, has been completed and
opened.
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