HOUGH not directly interested in the result of the controversy between lord Selkirk and the North West Company, we cannot feel wholly indifferent to the decision of a claim involving the jurisdiction of a large tract of this continent, nor view with unconcern the violent measures by which that claim has been enforced. Had the sanguinary scenes to which lord Selkirk's pretensions have given rise, occurred in a remote quarter of the globe, they would have attracted some attention from the novelty of the spectacle exhibited. Not that bloodshed is uncommon in our day, nor that there is any thing remarkable in the organizing of a body of desperados, by a popular leader for any enterprise, under any colours, but that a British peer's turning commercial speculator and land-jobber, and leaving his seat in parliament to wage war in his Britannic Majesty's dominions against a company of British merchants, is, even in these extraordinary times, a little singular-whilst the apathy with which the British ministry and the Colonial government have looked upon transactions so disgraceful to the national character, and so derogatory to the national faith, is still more strange and unaccountable. But the most important consequence of lord Selkirk's expedition, to us and to the world at large, and one which, independent of his failure or success, is its bringing again into notice a region to which a century since all eyes were turned, and reviving a question which had been put at rest without being solved. The impractibility of a North-West passage to the Indies is far from being ascercertained, and the present occasion has fed to a discussion of the subject in the

Quarterly Review*, which we trust will once more put discovery upon this track. How so pregnant an inquiry should have been suffered to fall into such total neglect it is not easy to imagine. The same fortitude and perseverance which have been wasted in exploring the sterile deserts of Africa for comparatively frivolous purposes, would long since have arrived at some certain conclusion on this most momentous point. We feel as if a degree of responsibility attached to our own government on this head. As the second commercial power in the world, and the first in this hemisphere, it might have been expected that some portion of our national spirit of maritime adventure would have been directed to an object so worthy, in either regard, of our attention. The Russian Count Romanzoff, with distinguished liberality, has equipped, at his private expense, a vessel under the com mand of Lieut. Kotzebue, for a voyage into the Arctic Sea, through Behring's Strait, in search of a passage into the Atlantic. This vessel was despatched more than a year since from St. Petersburgh, and touched at Plymouth in England. The attempt to sail through, from the Pacific Ocean into Hudson's Bay, or Baffin's Bay, was probably made last summer. We are yet to learn the issue of the enterprise. This splendid instance of individual munificence and enthusiasm in the cause of science should rouse an honourable emulation in enlightened and opulent mercantile communities. We

* No. XXXI.-Where the possibility of the passage is maintained, and a good account given of the various attempts made to effect it.