and had been better informed than the United States, for the reason that all the commerce was with England, and English capitalists who had large interests in the Hudson Bay Company, very naturally were better informed, but even they were not anxious for English colonization and an interference with their bonanza.
They controlled the English press, and so late as 1840 we read in the "British and Foreign Review," that "upon the whole, therefore, the Oregon country holds out no great promise as an agricultural field."
The London Examiner in 1843 wonders that "Ignorant Americans" were "disposed to quarrel over a country, the whole in dispute not being worth to either party twenty thousand pounds."
The Edinburgh Review, generally fair, said: "Only a very small portion of the land is capable of cultivation. It is a case in which the American people have been misled as to climate and soil. In a few years all that gives life to the country, both the hunter and his prey will be extinct, and 48 their places will be supplied by a thin white and half-breed population scattered along the fertile valleys supported by pastures instead of the chase, and gradually degenerating into barbarism, far more offensive than backwoodsmen." Our English friends, it may be observed, had long had a poor opinion of "backwoodsmen."
