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104 French and British trade regulations. [ieo&- to push on their settlements little by little, when it comes to a question of removing to a distance they will not do so, because the expense will fall upon themselves.... The settlers of New France are of a different mind. They always want to push on without troubling themselves about the settlement of the interior, because they earn more and are more inde- pendent when they are further away." In the main portion of the colony, the social tyranny, to escape from which is often the emigrant's first desire, was fully as oppressive as in the mother country. Indeed, the Church in Canada ruled society with a severity only paralleled by that of the New England Puritans; it sought to restrict men's pleasures and enforced, at least in La Hon tan's prejudiced view, "a perpetual Lent." Energy and enterprise rather than patience were characteristic of the early French colonist in Canada, if the opinion of Le Clercq, writing in 1691, may be trusted ; they want to reap, he says, as soon as they have sown. Had agriculture been made a definite and primary object, Upper Canada, Detroit, Illinois and the Ohio valley must have been opened with successful results ; failing that impulse, the drift westward towards a more favourable soil and climate was necessarily very slow. It is curious to observe too how markedly the French failed as breeders of stock, a business in which the Spaniards succeeded when necessity drove them to take it up. Having at first deliberately set aside the agricultural intention as unworthy and unnecessary when other forms of profit were accessible, the Spaniards ultimately made excellent use of the fertile hattes and savannahs, and developed a business which they were well suited by disposition to undertake. But the French lacked zeal in an employment the results of which are slower even than those of tillage. Thus for example in St Domingo, while the French colony imported large supplies of meat and was sometimes in danger of famine, the Spanish in the larger half of the island engaged in a salt-meat trade. The French backwardness would seem to have been partly due to certain unfortunate restrictions, for instance on slaughter-houses. The commercial regulations of the British and French colonies, though directed by like principles, worked out very differently in practice. The populous condition of New England and its confined geo- graphical position quickly brought the question of the mother-country's control of manufactures to the front. With the single exception of clayed sugars the French colonial produce never competed with home manufactures in a manner sufficiently threatening to raise professional alarm. The fact that the colonial sugar-refiners were for the most part liberally treated may however serve as an indication that, had a conflict of home and colonial interests arisen, the French government was more willing than the British to allow indulgence to the colonies. England, guided by the exigencies of the moment, swayed by each manifestation of mercantile hostility and without continuous colonial policy, was guilty