The infant commerce of the colony was strangled by monopolies. Great trading companies purchased at court, or favourites obtained gratuitously, exclusive right to buy furs from the Indians and to import all foreign goods used in the colonies--fixing at their own discretion the prices which they were to pay and to receive. Occasionally in a hard season they bought up the crops and sold them at famine prices. The violation of these monopolies by unlicensed persons was punishable by death. The colonists had no thought of self-government; they were a light-hearted, submissive race, who were contented with what the King was pleased to send them. Their officials plundered them, and with base avarice wasted their scanty stores. The people had no power for their own protection, and their cry of suffering was slow to gain from the distant King that justice which they were not able to enforce. The priest came with his people to guard their orthodoxy in this new land--to preserve that profound ignorance in which lay the roots of their devotion. Government discouraged the printing-press; scarcely any of the peasantry could so much as read. At a time when Connecticut expended one-fourth of its revenues upon the common school, the Canadian peasant was wholly uninstructed. In Quebec there had been, almost from the days of Champlain, a college for the training of priests. There and at Montreal were Jesuit seminaries, in which children of the well-to-do classes received a little instruction. A feeble attempt had been made to educate the children of the Indians; but for the children of the ordinary working Frenchmen settled in Canada no provision whatever had been made.