ebec for 50
half crowns.[2] Sixty years thereafter in 1688, Denonville, the
Governor and DeChampigny, the Intendant of New France, wrote to the
French Secretary of State, complaining of the dearness and scarcity of
labor, agricultural and domestic, and suggesting that the best remedy
would be to have Negro slaves. If His Majesty would agree to that
course, some of the principal inhabitants would have some bought in
the West Indies on the arrival of the Guinea ships. The minister
replied in 1689 in a note giving the King's consent but drawing
attention to the danger of the slaves coming from so different a
climate dying in Canada and thereby rendering the experiment of no
avail.[3]

The Indians were accustomed to make use of slaves, generally if not
universally of those belonging to other tribes: and the French
Canadians frequently bought Indian slaves from the aborigines. These
were called "Panis."[4] It would seem that a very few Indians were
directly enslaved by the inhabitants: but the chief means of acquiring
Panis was purchase from _les sauvages_.

The property in slaves was well recognized in International Law. We
find that in the Treaty of Peace and Neutrality in America signed at
London, November 16, 1686,[5] between the Kings of France and England,
which James II had arranged shortly after attaining the throne,
Article 10 provides that the subjects of neither nation should take
away the savage inhabitants, or their slaves or the goods which the
savages had taken belonging to the subjects of either nation, and that
they should give no assistance or protection to such raids and
pillage. In 1705 it was decided that Negroes in America were
"moveables," meubles, corresponding in substance to what is called
"personal property" in the English law.[6] This decision was on the
_Coutume de Paris_, the law of New France.

The Panis and Negro slaves were not always obedient. Jacques Raudot,
the Intendant, April 13, 1709, made an ordinance on "the Subject of
Negroes and Savages called Panis." In this he recited the advantage
the colony would acquire by certainty of ownership of the savages
called Panis "whose nation is far removed from this country" and that
certainty could only be brought about through the Indians who capture
them in their homes and deal for the most part with the English of
Carolina, but who sometimes in fact sell them to the Canadians who are
often defrauded of considerable sums through an idea of li