In addition to meeting the annual deficit of the colony the royal authorities encouraged and assisted emigration to New France.  Whole shiploads of settlers were at times gathered and sent to Quebec.  The seigneurs, by the terms of their grants, should have been active in this work; but very few of them took any share in it.  Nearly the entire task of applying a stimulus to emigration was thrust on the king and his officials at home.  Year after gear the governor and intendant grew increasingly urgent in repeated requests for more settlers, until a rebuke arrived in a suggestion that the king was not minded to depopulate France in order to people his colonies.  The influx of settlers was relatively large during the years 1663-72.  Then it dwindled perceptibly, although immigrants kept coming year by year so long as war did not completely cut off communication with France.  The colony gained bravely, moreover, through its own natural increase, for the colonial birth-rate was high, large families being everywhere the rule.  In 1673 the population of New France was figured at about seven thousand; in 1760 it had reached nearly fifty thousand.

The development of agriculture on the seigneurial lands did not, however, keep pace with growth in population.  It was hard to keep settlers to the prosaic task of tilling the soil.  There were too many distractions, chief among them the lure of the Indian trade.  The traffic in furs offered large profits and equally large risks; but it always yielded a full dividend of adventure and hair-raising experience.  The fascination of the forest life gripped the young men of the colony, and they left for the wilderness by the hundred.  There is a roving strain in Norman blood.  It brought the Norseman to France and Sicily; it took his descendants from the plough and sent them over the waters of the New World, from the St Lawrence to the Lakes and from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.  Church and state joined hands in attempt to keep them at home.  Royal decrees of outlawry and ecclesiastical edicts of excommunication were issued against them.  Seigneurs stipulated that their lands would be forfeited unless so many arpents were put under crop each year.  But all to little avail.  So far as developing the permanent resources of the colony were concerned these coureurs de bois might just as well have remained in France.  Once in a while a horde of them descended to Quebec or Montreal, disposed of their furs to merchants, filled themselves with brandy and turned bedlam loose in the town.  Then before the authorities could unwind the red tape of legal procedure they were off again to the wilds.