government of their own and for themselves. Their territory was not to be limited by the seacoast and by the Alleghany Mountains. It is true that they had not yet looked westward as the Frenchmen had, but they were contending with the Frenchmen for the trade in the East, and even for that in the West which the court of Versailles dreamed of monopolizing for the profit of those subjects to whom it gave trading privileges, and of those whom it had induced to quit their pleasant homes to go forth to the hardships and the rigor of the strange cold climate. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland with their fisheries were more profitable to Englishmen than to Frenchmen, and, wandering north in the pathway of Frobisher and Hendrik Hudson, English traders were entering the lands of the French north of the Great Lakes, and were reaping from the fur trade profits which had been presented by the great monarch to his favorites.
The charter which had been granted to Richelieu's Company of a Hundred Associates had expired, and in 1603 Canada became a royal province. Colbert had persuaded Louis XIV. to undertake the management of the country which was dedicated to missions and to the conversion of Indians. From it were excluded the Huguenots, who alone were willing to go there for the sake of establishing homes, while it was intended that its trade should enrich some favored noblemen who remained in France. This association which Champlain and Richelieu had brought into existence for resuscitating, or rather for creating, the fortunes of the dependent colony, had failed to accomplish its object—had failed, indeed, to undertake to accomplish its object. The Cardinal's consuming interest in the Thirty Years' War had prevented him from assisting it, or from hastening its ruin, as the case might be. No trade had been built up, and practically the only pursuits were the chase, and the fur trade which was its commercial expression. There was hardly any agriculture,—not enough to provide the food which was necessary to sustain the life of the colonists. France remained the nourishing mother of these people, who, for one reason or another, failed not only to live from their own fields, but tailed to break the virgin soil and to make fields. What agriculture there was was about Quebec. No fisheries had been established; no mines had been opened.
The Jesuits, who had been invited to the country by the Récollets, because these were too poor to carry on the chosen ecclesiastical work, dominated the new land. Their dream was to make of Canada a land of missionaries and of missions, to convert the Indian, and to create here a pure country devoted to the service of God. Never was there a higher ideal nor one less possible of realization. The zeal of these black-robed priests, their awful sufferings, the hideous outrages inflicted upon them by the Iroquois, their toils, their labors, and their sacrifices, have made one of the most harrowing pages of history, as well as one of the noblest of the many monuments to human fortitude and endurance. But however splendid their aspirations, the ecclesiastics certainly did not aid in the work of establishing a colony which might increase the glory of Louis or of France, or which might add to the sum of the world's civilization. They shut the door to wholesome immigration, and they did much to prevent the establishment or the maintenance of that profitable relation with the Indians which so greatly assisted our English forefathers to construct their states and to augment their profits. It is true also that they failed even in their efforts for the spiritual welfare of the Indians, and that, to the end, the rum of New England and New York was more potent with the savages than the gospel preached by devoted Jesuits.
The coureurs cles bois, by illicit traffic, were injuring the French monopolists; by their illegal sale of brandy to the Indians in their own homes, were in a constant quarrel with the Jesuits and the civil authorities; and by their own vices were a scandal to New France and to the old France which had shipped them to the colonies. These defiant outlaws, the arbitrary and controlling Laval, who was the Bishop of Quebec, weak governors, and an ignorant or indifferent company had made Canada a feeble colony of about 3500 people with but one industry, and that a breeder of discord,
