prominent citizens of the colony named by the king on the advice of his colonial representatives.  This council was both a law-making and a judicial body.  It registered and published the royal decrees, made local regulations, and acted as the supreme court of the colony.  But the official who loomed largest in the purely civil affairs of New France was the intendant.  He was the overseas apostle of Bourbon paternalism, and as his commission authorized him to ’order all things as he may think just and proper,’ the intendant never found much opportunity for idleness.

Tocqueville, shrewdest among historians of pre-revolutionary France, has somewhere pointed out that under the old regime the administration took the place of Providence.  It sought to be as omniscient and as omnipotent; its ways were quite as inscrutable.  In this policy the intendant was the royal man-of-all-work.  The king spoke and the intendant transformed his words into action.  As the sovereign’s great interest in the colony moved him to speak often, the intendant’s activity was prodigious.  Ordinances, edicts, judgments and decrees fairly flew from his pen like sparks from an anvil.  Nothing that needed setting aright was too inconsequential for a paternal order.  An ordinance establishing a system of weights and measures for the colony rubs shoulders with another inhibiting the youngsters of Quebec from sleigh-riding down its hilly thoroughfares in icy weather.  Printed in small type these decrees of the intendant’s make up a bulky volume, the present-day interest of which is only to show how often the hand of authority thrust itself into the daily walk and conversation of Old Canada.

From first to last there were a dozen intendants of New France.  Jean Talon, whose prudence and energy did much to set the colony on its feet, was the first; Fracois Bigot, the arch-plunderer of public funds, who did so much to bring the land to disaster, was the last.  Between them came a line of sensible, hard-working, and loyal men who gave the best that was in them to the uphill task of making the colony what their royal master wanted it to be.  Unfortunate it is that Bigot’s astounding depravity has led too many readers and writers of Canadian history to look upon the intendancy of New France as a post held chiefly by rascals.  As a class no men served the French crown more steadfastly or to better purpose.

Now it was to the intendant, in Talon’s time, that the king committed the duty of granting seigneuries and of supervising the seigneurial system in operation.  But, later, when Count Frontenac, the iron governor of the colony, came into conflict with the intendant on various other matters, he made complaint to the court at Versailles that the intendant was assuming too much authority.  A royal decree therefore ordered that for the future these grants should he made by the governor and intendant jointly.  Thenceforth they were usually so made, although in some cases