It was the royal desire that New France should some day become a powerful and prosperous agricultural colony, providing the motherland with an acceptable addition to its food supply.  To this end large tracts of land were granted upon most liberal terms to incoming settlers, and every effort was made to get these acres cultivated.  Encouragement and coercion were alike given a trial.  Settlers who did well were given official recognition, sometimes even to the extent of rank in the noblesse.  On the other hand those who left their lands uncleared were repeatedly threatened with the revocation of their land-titles, and in some cases their holdings were actually taken away.  From the days of the earliest settlement down to the eve of the English conquest, the officials of both the Church and the State never ceased to use their best endeavors in the interests of colonial agriculture.

Yet with all this official interest and encouragement agricultural development was slow.  Much of the land on both the north and the south shores of the St. Lawrence was heavily timbered, and the work of clearing proved tedious.  It was estimated that an industrious settler, working by himself, could clear not more than one superficial arpent in a whole season.  So slowly did the work make progress, in fact, that in 1712, after fifty years of royal paternalism, the cultivable area of New France amounted to only 150,000 arpents, and at the close of the French dominion in 1760 it was scarcely more than twice that figure,—­in other words, about five arpents for each head of population.

While industry and trade, particularly the Indian trade, took the attention and interest of a considerable portion in the population of New France, agriculture was from first to last the vocation of the great majority.  The census of 1695 showed more than seventy-five per cent of the people living on the farms of the colony and this ratio was almost exactly maintained, nearly sixty years later, when the census of 1754 was compiled.  This population was scattered along both banks of the St. Lawrence from a point well below Quebec to the region surrounding Montreal.  Most of the farms fronted on the river so that every habitant had a few arpents of marshy land for hay, a tract of cleared upland for ploughing, and an area extending to the rear which might be turned into meadow or left uncleared to supply him with firewood.

Wheat and maize were the great staples, although large quantities of oats, barley, and peas were also grown.  The wheat was invariably spring-sown, and the yield averaged from eight to twelve hundredweights per arpent, or from ten to fourteen bushels per acre.  Most of the wheat was made into flour at the seigneurial mills and was consumed in the colony, but shipments were also made with fair regularity to France, to the West Indies, and for a time to Louisbourg.  In 1736 the exports of wheat amounted to nearly 100,000