Читать книгу Reminiscences of a Raconteur, Between the '40s and the '20s - George H. Ham - Страница 30

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A well-known if not very prominent resident of Winnipeg was Mr. Thomas Spence, who arrived in the ’60’s. He was well educated and possessed of the average amount of brains, but he was not by any means in the first or second rank of statesmen, capitalists or commercial magnates. And yet Tom, as he was familiarly called, was the first and only president of a Canadian republic that ever existed. When the authority of the Hudson’s Bay Company was nearing an end, Tom hied himself to Portage la Prairie, then little more than a hamlet, and founded the Republic of Manitoba, which was to be altogether self-supporting and to be separate and distinct from the Hudson’s Bay Company, in fact a government on its own hook. Tom surrounded himself with a committee of five and immediately proceeded to provide for the levying of taxes, the erection of public buildings, the making of Indian treaties, the construction of roads and other public works, all of which he set forth in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In a little over four months after the dispatch of his letter, President Spence received a body blow in the shape of an acknowledgement from the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, in which he was plainly told that his “so-called self-supporting government had no force in law” and “no authority to create or organize a government without reference to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Crown,” and he was officially warned that he and his coadjutors were acting illegally and incurring grave responsibilities. The republic then collapsed—long before it had reached its first birthday. It was an inglorious ending, and Tom’s roseate dreams of a proud presidential career were rudely shattered. The ex-president returned to Winnipeg, and became satisfied with a fairly good position in the local Government service, but he always insisted that, if he had been given a chance, the Republic of Manitoba would have been one of the greatest and most prosperous countries in the universe—at any rate it would have been larger than the Principality of Monaco, more fertile than Greenland, not so torrid as Florida nor as mountainous as Mexico, and would have had as big a navy as Switzerland.