of the provincial intendants in France, and so broad was the wording, indeed, that one might well ask what other powers could be left for exercise by any one else.  No wonder that the eighteenth-century apostle of frenzied finance, John Law, should have laconically described France as a land “ruled by a king and his thirty intendants, upon whose will alone its welfare and its wants depend.”  Along with his commission Talon brought to the colony a letter of instructions from the minister which, gave more detailed directions as to what things he was to have in view and what he was to avoid.

In France the office of intendant had long been in existence.  Its creation in the first instance has commonly been attributed to Richelieu, but it really antedated the coming of the great cardinal.  The intendancy was not a spontaneous creation, but a very old and, in its origin, a humble post which grew in importance with the centralization of power in the King’s hands, and which kept step in its development with the gradual extinction of local self-government in the royal domains.  The provincial intendant in pre-revolutionary France was master of administration, finance, and justice within his own jurisdiction; he was bound by no rigid statutes; he owed obedience to no local authorities; he was appointed by the King and was responsible to his sovereign alone.

From first to last there were a dozen intendants of New France.  Talon, whose ambition and energy did much to set the colony in the saddle, was the first.  Francois Bigot, the arch-plunderer of his monarch’s funds, who did so much to bring the land to its downfall, was the last.  Between them came a line of sensible, earnest, hard-working officials who served their King far better than they served themselves, who gave the best years of their lives to the task of making New France a bright jewel in the Bourbon crown.  The colonial intendant was the royal man-of-all-work.  The King spoke and the intendant forthwith transformed his words into action.  As the King’s great interest in New France, coupled with his scant knowledge of its conditions, moved him to speak often, and usually in broad generalities, the intendant’s activity was prodigious and his discretion wide.  Ordinances and decrees flew from his pen like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge.  The duty devolved upon him as the overseas apostle of Gallic paternalism to “order everything as seemed just and proper,” even when this brought his hand into the very homes of the people, into their daily work or worship or amusements.  Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential to have an ordinance devoted to it.  As general regulator of work and play, of manners and morals, of things present and things to come, the intendant was the busiest man in the colony.