to a complete standstill, was regarded as a necessary system of checks
and balances in a colony which lay three thousand miles away. It
prevented any chance of a general conspiracy against the home
authorities or any wholesale wrong-doing through collusion. It served
to make every official a ready tale-bearer in all matters concerning
the motives and acts of his colleagues, so that the King might with,
reasonable certainty count upon hearing all the sides to every story.
That, in fact, was wholly in consonance with Latin traditions of
government, and it was characteristically the French way of doing
things in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Louis XIV took a great personal interest in New France even to the
neglect at times of things which his courtiers deemed to be far
more important. The governor and the intendant plied him with their
requests, with their grievances, and too often with their prosy tales
of petty squabbling. With every ship they sent to Versailles their
_mémoires_, often of intolerable length; and the patient monarch read
them all. Marginal notes, made with his own hand, are still upon many
of them, and the student who plods his way through the musty bundles
of official correspondence in the _Archives Nationales_ will find in
these marginal comments enough to convince him that, whatever the
failings of Louis XIV may have been, indolence was not of them. Then
with the next ships the King sent back his budget of orders, counsel,
reprimand, and praise. If the colony failed to thrive, it was not
because the royal interest in it proved insincere or deficient.

The progress of New France, as reported in these dispatches from
Quebec, with their figures of slow growth in population, of poor
crops, and of failing trade, of Indian troubles and dangers from the
English, of privations at times and of deficits always, must often