and with very little hope for the future. And it was this colony which Louis XIV. and his great minister undertook to build up, not as a rival so much as an absorber of England in the New World. This hostile England, it was intended, was to be cooped up along the coast of the Atlantic, with a western boundary stopped, at the farthest, by the Alleghany Mountains. It was to be for a time, and until France had wholly swallowed her, about such a country as Count Vergennes was quite willing, in 1782, the United States should become as a result of our war of the Revolution. Gradually the great and crushing folds of France were to stretch out to the prairies beyond the Great Lakes, having first wound about the shores of Hudson's Bay; then they were to reach down the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. The vision was splendid. The now Great West thus came into the thoughts of men; but while the Frenchmen strove to push forward the boundaries of France, making her population thinner and thinner in proportion to her territory, Englishmen and Dutchmen toiled to build up governments that would protect and foster their industries. Between the two, their lands extending from the Hudson to Niagara, dwelt the fierce Iroquois. At these Champlain had fired the first shot which was ever heard upon the lake that bears his name; now, by their wars and by their cunning duplicity, these Indians were to stand in the way of French progress in the West, were to assist the thrifty enterprises, and to advance the material and political interests of the colonies to the south.
Louis XIV. was well served at the beginning of his Canadian experiment. His determination was to create a state, and he was not pleased with Laval's determination to construct a theocracy, although, in reality, no one helped Laval so far along his way. The King and his minister agreed in their colonial policy. They restrained the liberty of their distant subjects in order that monopoly might nourish. Yet his first move for the benefit of Canada, after his interest in the new land had been awakened, was to limit the rights of the Company of the West, to change its power to monopolize the fur trade to a power to levy duties upon its skins, and to deprive it of its right to appoint a Governor and Intendant. He assumed that power himself. Thenceforth the government of the colony was to be political, tempered by ecclesiastical opposition.
In 1664 Daniel de Rémur, Sieur de Courcelle, was appointed Governor-General. Jean Baptiste Talon was named as Intendant, and, with them was the Marquis de Tracy, who was appointed viceroy for all America. Under Courcelle's government the colony flourished as it had not under former governors or under the complete monopolies of Richelieu and Lous XIV. The Mohawks were punished, the other tribes of the Five Nations begged for peace, and the Jesuit missions among the natives increased in number and grew in influence. The population, too, increased. Agriculture was stimulated by rewards, as were also large families. The court at Versailles and their representatives at Quebec made every effort, short of the one essential effort, to build up a colony that would be an ornament of the crown and an honor to France. Liberty, however, was to be still unknown in Canada; the door was kept shut to the most industrious citizens of the kingdom; and the contest between the Church and the state went on. Courcelle and Talon did their best, and Talon was one of the ablest statesmen ever employed by France at home or abroad. He seconded bravely Colbert's colonial policy. He hoped to encourage Canadian immigration; he pushed the useful works of the colony with energy.
The population had increased under this administration, by 1671, to 6000 people; but still it was not a land of such hardy, industrious, and intelligent pioneers as were the colonies farther south. Canada was a military colony. The King urged the soldiers of the Carignan-Salières regiment to remain, and of those who acquiesced the officers became feudal seigneurs and the men feudal tenants. It was during this administration, also, that French adventurers, La Salle among them, began to peer into the wildernesses of the West. Courcelle and Talon, the King's efficient officers, established the political interest in Canada alongside of the mis-
