THE REASONS WHY Russia was willing to sell her remaining American colonies in 1867 and those which persuaded the United States to become the purchaser have long been a subject of inquiry. Among the possible motives it has often been suggested that there was a mutual desire to limit British power in North America. Russia, it is claimed, was anxious to prevent her colonies from falling into the hands of the power which she had recently fought in the Crimea, and the United States, at least in the person of Secretary of State Seward, saw the transfer as a logical stage in the evolution of manifest destiny. Seward's motives have seldom been seriously questioned in the face of the abundant evidence he provided in his own speeches, but Russian fears of Britain have been discounted in recent studies. Chevigny, for instance, has commented that "some of the errors made by the old writers remain rooted to this day. The prime one has to do with Russia's motive for selling Alaska, which was not fear of Britain."' Chevigny himself attaches more importance to Russian-American friendship than to Russian-British antipathy: "there is the direct result that we have Alaska, which was for sale only to the United States, with whom the Russian government ... wished to seal forever a friendliness that had prevailed for over sixty years."2 This does not accord with opinions expressed in two recent histories of the Hudson's Bay Com-