of the colony were sacrificed to the settlement of personal
jealousies. Many dramatic scenes were enacted around the long table at
which the councilors sat at their weekly sessions, for every Monday
through the greater portion of the year the Council convened at seven
o'clock in the morning and usually sat until noon or later. But
these were only meteoric flashes. Historians have given them undue
prominence because such episodes make racy reading. By far the greater
portion of the council's meetings were devoted to the serious and
patient consideration of routine business. Matters of infinite variety
came to it for determination, including the regulation of industry and
trade, the currency, the fixing of prices, the interpretation of
the rules relating to land tenure, fire prevention, poor
relief, regulation of the liquor traffic, the encouragement of
agriculture--and these are only a few of the topics taken at random
from its calendar. In addition there were thousands of disputes
brought to it for settlement either directly or on appeal from the
lower courts. The minutes of its deliberations during the ninety-seven
years from September 18, 1663, to April 8, 1760, fill no fewer than
fifty-six ponderous manuscript volumes.

Though, in the edict establishing the Sovereign Council, no mention
was made of an intendant, the decision to send such an official to New
France came very shortly thereafter. In 1665 Jean Talon arrived
at Quebec bearing a royal commission which gave him wide powers,
infringing to some extent on the authority vested in the Sovereign
Council two years previously. The phraseology was similar to that used
in the commissions of the provincial intendants in France, and so
broad was the wording, indeed, that one might well ask what other
powers could be left for exercise by any one else. No wonder that the
eighteenth-century apostle of frenzied finance, John Law, should have