The nomadic habits of the Indians and the ever-recurring warfare prevented them from achieving a great success in Canada. In the softer districts by the St. Lawrence and the lakes they succeeded in establishing a few of their agricultural colonies, but their work was arduous, dangerous, and not generally profitable, and even the prestige of the French government, for which they acted as political agents, did not enable them to convert a very large proportion of the Indians. Moreover, much as we may admire the devotion and endurance many of them displayed in seeking to win the fierce and roving tribes, commercial eagerness taints their work indelibly. When they first received permission to enter Canada from Henry IV., they were long detained in France because they refused to come to an agreement about trade with the lay colonists, and their first missionaries were captured by the English in an endeavour to cross the seas without this understanding. Eighty years later, when peace was made with the formidable Iroquois, who had so often blighted their work, the Indian spokesman insisted that they would not admit the Jesuits, as the fathers sought only their beavers and their women. On the other hand, no one questions the great political service they rendered to their government in disposing the Indians to receive French authority and embittering them against the English. Their story, until England took Canada in 1759, and France itself disowned them a few years later, was one of individual devotion overshadowed by a corporate occupation with commerce and politics.