This relative proficiency in home industry accounts in part for the tardy progress of the colony in the matter of large industrial establishments.  But there were other handicaps.  For one thing, the Paris authorities were not anxious to see the colony become industrially self-sustaining.  Colbert in his earliest instructions to Talon wrote as though this were the royal policy, but no other minister ever hinted at such a desire.  Rather it was thought best that the colony should confine itself to the production of raw materials, leaving it to France to supply manufactured wares in return.  The mercantilist doctrine that a colony existed for the benefit of the mother country was gospel at Fontainebleau.  Even Montcalm, a man of liberal inclinations, expressed this idea with undiminished vigor in a day when its evil results must have been apparent to the naked eye.  “Let us beware,” he wrote, “how we allow the establishment of industries in Canada or she will become proud and mutinous like the English colonies.  So long as France is a nursery to Canada, let not the Canadians be allowed to trade but kept to their laborious life and military services.”

The exclusion of the Huguenots from Canada was another industrial misfortune.  A few Huguenot artisans came to Quebec from Rochelle at an early date, and had they been welcomed, more would soon have followed.  But they were promptly deported.  From an economic standpoint this was an unfortunate policy.  The Huguenots were resourceful workmen, skilled in many trades.  They would have supplied the colony with a vigorous and enterprising stock.  But the interests of orthodoxy in religion were paramount with the authorities, and they kept from Canada the one class of settlers which most desired to come.  Many of those same Huguenots went to England, and every student of economic history knows how greatly they contributed to the upbuilding of England’s later supremacy in the textile and related industries.

If we turn to the field of commerce, the spirit of restriction appears as prominently as in the domain of industry.  The Company of One Hundred Associates, during its thirty years of control, allowed no one to proceed to Quebec except on its own vessels, and nothing could be imported except through its storehouses.  Its successor, the Company of the West Indies, which dominated colonial commerce from 1664 to 1669, was not a whit more liberal.  Even under the system of royal government, the consistent keynotes of commercial policy were regulation, paternalism, and monopoly.

This is in no sense surprising.  Spain had first given to the world this policy of commercial constraint and the great enrichment of the Spanish monarchy was everywhere held to be its outcome.  France, by reason of her similar political and administrative system, found it easy to drift into the wake of the Spanish example.  The official classes in England and Holland would fain have had these countries do