than they had done since the French occupation.”  Talon worked with all his might in developing the resources of the colony, by exploiting the mines, by encouraging the fisheries, agriculture, the exportation of timber, and general commerce, and especially by inducing, through the gift of a few acres of ground, the majority of the soldiers of the regiment of Carignan to remain in the country.  He entered every house to enquire of possible complaints; he took the first census, and laid out three villages near Quebec.  His plans for the future were vaster still:  he recommended the king to buy or conquer the districts of Orange and Manhattan; moreover, according to Abbe Ferland, he dreamed of connecting Canada with the Antilles in commerce.  With this purpose he had had a ship built at Quebec, and had bought another in order to begin at once.  This very first year he sent to the markets of Martinique and Santo Domingo fresh and dry cod, salted salmon, eels, pease, seal and porpoise oil, clapboards and planks.  He had different kinds of wood cut in order to try them, and he exported masts to La Rochelle, which he hoped to see used in the shipyards of the Royal Navy.  He proposed to Colbert the establishment of a brewery, in order to utilize the barley and the wheat, which in a few years would be so abundant that the farmer could not sell them.  This was, besides, a means of preventing drunkenness, and of retaining in the country the sum of one hundred thousand francs, which went out each year for the purchase of wines and brandies.  M. Talon presented at the same time to the minister the observations which he had made on the French population of the country.  “The people,” said Talon, “are a mosaic, and though composed of colonists from different provinces of France whose temperaments do not always sympathize, they seem to me harmonious enough.  There are,” he added, “among these colonists people in easy circumstances, indigent people and people between these two extremes.”

But he thought only of the material development of the colony; upon others, he thought, were incumbent the responsibility for and defence of spiritual interests.  He was mistaken, for, although he had not in his power the direction of souls, his duties as a simple soldier of the army of Christ imposed upon him none the less the obligation of avoiding all that might contribute to the loss of even a single soul.  The disorders which were the inevitable result of a free traffic in intoxicating liquors, finally assumed such proportions that the council, without going as far as the absolute prohibition of the sale of brandy to the Indians, restricted, nevertheless, this deplorable traffic; it forbade under the most severe penalties the carrying of firewater into the woods to the savages, but it continued to tolerate the sale of intoxicating liquors in the French settlements.  It seems that Cavelier de la Salle himself, in his store at Lachine where he dealt with the Indians, did not scruple to sell them this fatal poison.