Such was the colony, its land, and its people. There is no exact parallel to be found in the story of other European colonies. None of them, perhaps, started with such very strong contrasts. Canada was not a seaboard colony, it was a purely inland colony; yet its settlements were so many little ports, and its active life was mainly by, and on, the water. It was pre-eminently not a colony of towns or of townsfolk, yet Quebec was as much the heart of Canada as Paris was of France, and the conquest of Canada consisted {103} in the taking of Quebec and Montreal. It was not a plantation colony, it was not a mining colony, it was not a pastoral colony; it was a colony of agriculturists and hunters, and its trade, such as it was, came not so much from agriculture as from the chase. No colonists were ever more carefully drilled and organized than the Canadian agriculturists; none ever lived a life of more unbounded freedom than the Canadian _coureurs de bois_. The drilling and organization of the one element, and the roving enterprise of the other, combined to produce a good fighting population; but the extremes in either case were too great to result in forming a community, which should be at once stable and progressive. What was natural in Canada was not colonization. What was colonization, that is to say permanent European settlement in the land, was purely artificial. The system of settlement was cleverly conceived, and skilfully as well as humanely carried into effect; but it depended not on law so much as on the personal will of an absolute master. It was wanting in safeguards, it was wanting in elasticity, it stunted individual effort, and it contained no element of growth. A full-blown colony was called into being under regulations which implied childhood, and the result was to leave the Canadians contented so long as they knew no other rules of life, but to leave them standing still, while their English rivals, neither too lawless nor too conservative, grew out of infancy into clumsy manhood, and proved their strength when the fullness of the time was come. [Sidenote: _Arrival of De Tracy, De Courcelles, and Talon._] On June 30, 1665, the Marquis de Tracy arrived at Quebec. He had been appointed by the King of France Lieutenant-General for the time being of all his American possessions, including the West Indies; and, before coming to Canada, he had visited Cayenne and the French West India Islands. His mission was temporary, to put the colony in a proper state of defence, and to inaugurate the system of administration devised by the King. The new Governor {104} of Canada, De Courcelles, and the Intendant, Talon, landed in September of the same year. They were good men for their respective posts--the one a keen soldier, the other, Talon, a born administrator, whose power of organization and creative genius left a lasting mark on New France. [Sidenote: _Operations against the Iroquois._]