While reviewing the great intendant’s activities, we must not fail to mention the brewing industry in which he took the lead.  In 1668 he erected a brewery near the river St Charles, on the spot at the foot of the hill where stood in later years the intendant’s palace.  He meant in this way to help the grain-growers by taking part of their surplus product, and also to do something to check the increasing importation of spirits which caused so much trouble and disorder.  However questionable the efficacy of beer in promoting temperance, Talon’s object is worthy of applause.  Three years later the intendant wrote that his brewery was capable of turning out two thousand hogsheads of beer for exportation to the West Indies and two thousand more for home consumption.  To do this it would require over twelve thousand bushels of grain annually, and would be a great support to the farmers.  In the mean-time he had planted hops on his farm and was raising good crops.

Talon’s buoyant reports and his incessant entreaties for a strong and active colonial policy could not fail to enlist the sympathy of two such statesmen as Louis XIV and Colbert.  This is perhaps the only period in earlier Canadian history during which the home government steadily followed a wise and energetic policy of developing and strengthening the colony.  We have seen that Colbert hesitated at first to encourage emigration, but he had yielded somewhat before Talon’s urgent representations, and from 1665 to 1671 there was an uninterrupted influx of Canadian settlers.  It is recorded in a document written by Talon himself that in 1665 the West India Company brought to Canada for the king’s account 429 men and 100 young women, and 184 men and 92 women in 1667.  During these seven years there were in all 1828 state-aided immigrants to Canada.  The young women were carefully selected, and it was the king’s wish that they should marry promptly, in order that the greatest possible number of new families should be founded.  As a matter of fact, the event was in accordance with the king’s wish.  In 1665 Mother Marie de l’Incarnation wrote that the hundred girls arrived that year were nearly all provided with husbands.  In 1667 she wrote again:  ’This pear ninety-two girls came from France and they are already married to soldiers and labourers.’  In 1670 one hundred and fifty girls arrived, and Talon wrote on November 10:  ’All the girls who came this year are married, except fifteen whom I have placed in well-known families to await the time when the soldiers who sought them for their wives are established and able to maintain them.’  It was indeed a matrimonial period, and it is not surprising that marriage was the order of the day.  Every incentive to that end was brought to bear.  The intendant gave fifty livres in household supplies and some provisions to each young woman who contracted marriage.  According to the king’s decree, each youth who married at or before the age of twenty was entitled