If anything like the industry and intelligence that was bestowed upon agriculture in the English colonies had been applied to the St. Lawrence valley, New France might have shipped far more wheat than beaver skins each year to Europe.  But in this respect the colony never half realized the royal expectations.  On the other hand, the attempt to make the land a rich grain-growing colony was far from being a flat failure.  It was supporting its own population, and had a modest amount of grain each year for export to France or to the French West Indies.  With peace it would soon have become a land of plenty, for the traveler who passed along the great river from Quebec to Montreal in the late autumn might see, as Kalm in his Travels tells us he saw, field upon field of waving grain extending from the shores inward as far as the eye could reach, broken only here and there by tracts of meadow and woodland.  Here was at least the nucleus of a Golden West.

Of colonial industry, however, not as much can be said as of agriculture.  Down to about 1663 it had given scarcely a single token of existence.  The colony, until that date, manufactured nothing.  Everything in the way of furnishings, utensils, apparel, and ornament was brought in the company’s ships from France, and no one seemed to look upon this procedure as at all unusual.  On the coming of Talon in 1665, however, the idea of fostering home industries in the colony took active shape.  By persuasion and by promise of reward, the “Colbert of New France” interested the prominent citizens of Quebec in modest industrial enterprises of every sort.

But the outcome soon belied the intendant’s airy hopes.  It was easy enough to make a brave start in these things, especially with the aid of an initial subsidy from the treasury; but to keep the wheels of industry moving year after year without a subvention was an altogether different thing.  A colony numbering less than ten thousand souls did not furnish an adequate market for the products of varied industries, and the high cost of transportation made it difficult to export manufactured wares to France or to the West Indies with any hope of profit.  A change of tone, moreover, soon became noticeable in Colbert’s dispatches with reference to industrial development.  In 1665, when giving his first instructions to Talon, the minister had dilated upon his desire that Canada should become self-sustaining in the matter of clothing, shoes, and the simpler house-furnishings.  But within a couple of years Colbert’s mind seems to have taken a different shift, and we find him advising Talon that, after all, it might be better if the people of New France would devote their energies to agriculture and thus to raise enough grain wherewith to buy manufactured wares from France.  So, for one reason or another, the infant industries languished, and, after Talon was gone, they gradually dropped out of existence.