‘The French,’ so ran Murray’s report, ‘bent their whole attention in this part of the world to the fur-trade.’ They neglected agriculture and the fisheries. ‘The inhabitants are inclinable enough to be lazy, and not much skilled in husbandry, the great dependencies they have hitherto had on the gun and fishing-rod made them neglect tillage beyond the requisites of their own consumption and the few purchases they needed.’ Gage wrote that ‘the only immediate importance and advantage the French king derived from Canada was the preventing the extension of the British colonies, the consumption of the commodities and manufactures of France, and the trade of pelletry’. He noted how common it was ‘for the servants, whom the merchants hired to work their boats and assist in their trade, through a long habit of Indian manners and customs, at length to adopt their way of life, to intermarry with them, and turn savages’. Burton’s report was to the same effect: ‘The laziness of the people, and the alluring and momentary advantages they reaped from their traffic with the Indians in the upper countries, and the counterband trade they carried on with the English colonies, have hitherto prevented the progress of husbandry;’ and again, ‘The greatest part of the young men, allured by the debauched and rambling life which always attend the Indian trade in the upper countries, never thought of settling at home till they were almost worn out with diseases or premature old age.’ It was a country and a people of strong contrasts, wholly unlike their own colonies, that the English were called upon to rule. At head quarters and near it there was a cast-iron system in Church and State, trade monopoly, an administration at once despotic and corrupt. Behind there was a boundless wild, to which French restlessness, French adaptability for dealing with native races, and the possibilities of illicit wealth called the young and enterprising, who were impatient of control, and who could not share the gains of corruption at Montreal and Quebec. In Canada there was no gradual and continuous widening of settlement, such as marked the English colonies in North America. In those colonies development was spontaneous but, in the main, civilized; not according to fixed rule, but not contrary to law, the law being home-made and not imposed from without.