missionaries, nor approbation for American traders. In short, the term American with them was synonymous with boorishness and dishonesty.
The liberal party, of which McLoughlin was understood to be the leader, though they admitted that Americans were not exempt from charges of trickery and tyranny, being slaveholders, and sometimes even thereafter repudiating honest debts; and that the half-apostolical and half-agricultural character of the missionaries was not, in their judgment, the highest example of clerical dignity; and that the American traders did domineer over and corrupt the natives; yet they thought that Americans ought not to be excluded, because they had some claims to the right of Occupancy, claims really existing, though feeble, which would make it both impolitic and unjust to exclude them from possession. And as to American lynch-law and other usages repugnant to justice and humanity, they were rather exceptions to the American code than examples of American principles of legislation, which in commercial and civil matters was, generally speaking, just and humane, and from which even British legislation might derive some useful hints. They had hopes, too, that the Americans, by the influence of the gentlemen fur-traders, would become more civilized. Such sentiments amused Farnham when he was at Fort Vancouver,[1] and troubled many later comers, who felt their national dignity assaulted by British patronage of this sort.[2] There was an Arcadian simplicity about Fort Vancouver life, in its early days, that awakens some-
- ↑ 'Another was a Mr Simpson, a young Scotchman of respectable family, a clerk in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. This was a fine fellow, twenty-five years of age, full of energy and good feeling, well informed on general topics, and like most other British subjects abroad, troubled with an irrepressible anxiety at the growing power of the States, and an overwhelming loyalty toward the mother country and its sovereign skirts.' Farnham's California and Oregon, 8.
- ↑ 'I often heard Dr McLoughlin say: "These Englishmen when they first come out are such rabid democrats; but in a few years they always are at least conservative." Robert' Recollections, MS., 17.
