The opening years of the nineteenth century were marked by a noble project that apparently ended in failure at the time and yet whose significance is not lost. In every worthy purpose, cosmopolitan, national, or individual in its scope, there is the germ of vitality, and dying in one form it is resurrected in another. Truly of such purposes may be said, in the sublime words of the apostle, that they are "sown in weakness, but raised in power."
"The good, though only thought, has life and breath."
Such a project was that of the Earl of Selkirk to assist numbers of his poorer countrymen by founding a colony for them in the Hudson Bay Territory, where they should find homes and engage in pleasant and profitable agricultural work. With Lord Selkirk it was not the dazzling opportunities of the fur trade that impelled his journey, when, in 1815, he with Lady Selkirk and their son and two daughters landed in Montreal, having already sent out three parties of his country people to the tract of land whose area was that of a hundred and ten { 18} thousand square miles which he had purchased in the Red River Valley. His scheme for the betterment of these people included free transportation and temporary support for the settler until he could begin to make his own way, together with a free gift of the land. It was in 1810 that Lord Selkirk had matured his scheme and purchased the land; but on arriving with his family he found himself assailed with charges of conspiracy, condemned to the payment of fines that he contended were totally unjust, and confronted with a strange network of alleged misrepresentation and accusation. It would seem that his chief desire was that of generous and noble aid to his countrymen. His experience is not without its parallel pervading all history in the lives of men whose single-hearted aim has been to make the world a better place. Who shall penetrate the spiritual mystery in that he whose efforts are noble and unselfish not infrequently confronts the same results as might properly belong to him whose objects were quite the reverse of these? "And that all this should have come to you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find out better ways," exclaims George Eliot's Dorothea to Lydgate, in the great novel of _Middlemarch_; and the heroine adds: "There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that--to love what is great and try to reach it and then fail."