But while the elements of future trouble were plainly visible, no serious friction occurred during the first year of the new governor's administration. His relations with the Jesuit order were civil, and with the Sulpicians, at Montreal, and the Recollets entirely friendly. With the Sovereign Council, too, they were all that could be wished. His mind at this time was greatly taken up with the project he had in view of following in Courcelles' footsteps and establishing a military and trading post at Cataraqui. His general policy when he wanted to do a thing was not to ask permission beforehand, but to do it, and trust to the result for justification. Had he laboured under Nelson's disability, he would have been quite capable of turning his blind eye to a prohibitive signal, even after seeing it distinctly with his good one. In his despatch to Colbert of the 2nd November he mentions, in a casual way, that he proposes next spring to visit the place at the outlet of Lake Ontario where M. de Courcelles had projected the establishment of a fort, in order that he may be able "the better to understand its site and importance, and to see if, notwithstanding our actual weakness, it be not possible to create some establishment there that would also strengthen the settlement the gentlemen of Montreal [the Sulpicians] have already formed at Quinte." He adds: "I beg of you, my Lord, to be assured that I shall not spare either care or trouble, or even my life itself, if it be necessary, in the effort to accomplish something pleasing to you, and to prove the gratitude I shall ever feel for the favours I have received at your hands." This is quite effusive, and at the same time tolerably diplomatic. How _could_ the minister do otherwise than approve an enterprise undertaken in so self-sacrificing a spirit, and one prompted by so much personal devotion to himself? Colbert might possibly have replied--if he had had the chance--by pointing Frontenac to his instructions, and asking him to show his devotion to duty by following them out as closely as possible. Those instructions contained the following clause, the tenor of which we shall find repeated in many subsequent communications from the home government: "Sieur de Frontenac is to encourage the inhabitants by all possible means to undertake the cultivation and clearing of the soil; and as the distance of the settlements from one another has considerably retarded the increase thereof, and otherwise facilitated the opportunities of the Iroquois for their destructive expeditions, Sieur de Frontenac will consider the practicability of obliging those inhabitants to make contiguous clearings, either by constraining the old colonists to labour at it for a certain time, or by making new grants to future settlers under this condition." There is not a word said about extending the boundaries of the colony, or throwing out advanced posts, or any other phase of the policy of expansion. The French government was