Chapter II
AMERICAN SELF-GOVERNMENT
As the arrival of the Americans in Oregon placed two opposing systems of industry, representing opposing nationalities, in open and active competition, in the same manner were two conflicting ideals of government brought into contact. The purposes and ends of the British occupation in the Northwest called for centralized and arbitrary government. Primarily a commercial organization, the vast interests of the Hudson's Bay Company necessitated a strong political organization, which was necessarily autocratic in form and spirit. And as far as the English Government was concerned, the Company's law was the British Constitution in the Oregon Territory. The Hudson's Bay governor and his council had authority not only to punish their own offenders but also to try for any crimes in any of "the said Company's plantations, forts, factories or places of trade within the Hudson's Bay territory."[1] For the furtherance and protection of the interests of the fur trade, the vast territory must be carefully policed, and thorough police organization is another expression for arbitrary authority. All of the employees of the Company were subject to the most rigid discipline, not less complete than in the British military organization itself. If exceptions were made to the rule forbidding settlement as in the case of the Canadian settlers on French Prairie, the relations established were in a large measure feudal. "Authority" was the keynote of British rule in the Northwest, and authority always exerted from above.
How anti-thetical was all this to the spirit and training of the American settler—the heir of generations of local self-government! Indeed, eliminating from the history of his fathers the story of their struggle for and their activities in, the exercise of self-government, there would be little worth the telling. The story of the movement of westward expansion is the story of the establishing and growth of free local institu-
- ↑ H. H. Bancroft, "History of Oregon," Vol. i, p. 48.
