cial, if not always for the royal treasury of
France.

"The colonies of foreign nations so long settled on the sea board,"
wrote the Intendant Talon in 1671, "are trembling with fright in view of
what your Majesty has accomplished here in the last seven years." In
fact, the thrifty and unadventurous farmers along the Atlantic were as
yet only too indifferent to the importance of Canada; still less did
they foresee the New France of which La Salle was at that moment
dreaming. After a dozen years of heart-breaking discouragements, that
somber idealist finally reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the
Mississippi. It was on the 9th of April, 1682, at the mouth of the
Father of Waters, that he proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis XIV over
"this country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the river St. Louis,
otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert, or
Mississippi, and the rivers that discharge thereinto, from its source as
far as its mouth at the sea." To make sure the title thus announced to
the silent wilderness, a pillar bearing the arms of France was erected,
and a lead plate buried in the sand. The inscription would scarcely have
frightened away even a stray Englishman, had he chanced to see it; but
when, in December of the same year, La Salle built his wooden fort on
the rock of St. Louis, there began to emerge from the world of dreams to
the world of realities the vision of a greater New France, held together
by a chain of forts on all the inland waterways from the mouth of the
St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and exploiting, through
friendly alliance with the native tribes, the rich fur trade of the
continent.

It was during the last decade of the Stuart regime, when the efficient
committee known as the Lords of Trade had charge of colonial affairs,
that the English Government first set seriously about the task of
checking the growing power of France and of suppressing illicit trade.
To aid the governors in enforcing the navigation laws, collectors and
comptrollers of the customs had been established in nearly every colony
by 1678; in 1688 William Dyre, responsible to the English customs
commissioners, was appointed surveyor-general and placed at the head of
the American service; and it was mainly on the ground of illegal trade
that Massachusetts was made a crown colony in 1684. The doughty Colonel
Dongan, who came out as Governor of New York in 1683, was one of the
first to see the impor