Every year, about the beginning of May, the first ships left France for the St. Lawrence with general cargoes consisting of goods for the colonists themselves and for the Indians, as well as large quantities of brandy.  When they arrived at Quebec, the vessels were met by the merchants of the town and by those who had come from Three Rivers and Montreal.  For a fortnight lively trading took place.  Then the goods which had been bought by the merchants of Montreal and Three Rivers were loaded upon small barques and brought to these towns to be in readiness for the annual fairs when the coureurs-de-bois and their Indians came down to trade in the late summer.  As for the vessels which had come from France, these were either loaded with timber or furs and set off directly home again, or else they departed light to Cape Breton and took cargoes of coal for the French West Indies, where the refining of sugar occasioned a demand for fuel.  The last ships left in November, and for seven months the colony was cut off from Europe.

Trade at Quebec, while technically open to any one who would pay the duties and observe the regulations as to rates of profit, was actually in the hands of a few merchants who had large warehouses and who took the greater part of what the ships brought in.  These men were, in turn, affiliated more or less closely with the great trading houses which sent goods from Rouen or Rochelle, so that the monopoly was nearly as ironclad as when commercial companies were in control.  When an outsider broke into the charmed circle, as happened occasionally, there was usually some way of hustling him out again by means either fair or foul.  The monopolists made large profits, and many of them, after they had accumulated a fortune, went home to France.  “I have known twenty of these pedlars,” quoth La Hontan, “that had not above a thousand crowns stock when I arrived at Quebec in the year 1683 and when I left that place had got to the tune of twelve thousand crowns.”

Glancing over the whole course of agriculture, industry, and commerce in New France from the time when Champlain built his little post at the foot of Cape Diamond until the day when the fleur-de-lis fluttered down from the heights above, the historian finds that there is one word which sums up the chief cause of the colony’s economic weakness.  That word is “paternalism.”  The Administration tried to take the place of Providence.  It was as omnipresent and its ways were as inscrutable.  Like as a father chasteneth his children, so the King and his officials felt it their duty to chasten every show of private initiative which did not direct itself along the grooves that they had marked out for the colony to follow.  By trying to order everything they eventually succeeded in ordering nothing aright.

CHAPTER XI

HOW THE PEOPLE LIVED