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
_memoires_, 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
have dampened the royal hopes. The requests for subsidies from
the royal purse were especially relentless. Every second dispatch
contained pleas for money or for things which were bound to cost money
if the King provided them: money to enable some one to clear his
lands, or to start an industry, or to take a trip of exploration to
the wilds; money to provide more priests, to build churches, or to
repair fortifications; money to pension officials--the call for money
was incessant year after year. In the face of these multifarious
demands upon his exchequer, Louis XIV was amazingly generous, but the
more he gave, the more the colony asked from him. Until the end of his
days, he never failed in response if the object seemed worthy of
his support. It was not until the Grand Monarch was gathered to his
fathers that the officials of New France began to ply