*** Doutre et Lareau, Hist, du Droit Canadien, 254. France, had no reason to complain. If the king permitted governors and intendants to make card money, he permitted nobody to impose taxes but himself. The Canadians paid no direct civil tax, except in a few instances where temporary and local assessments were ordered for special objects. It was the fur trade on which the chief burden fell. One-fourth of the beaver-skins, and one-tenth of the moose-hides, belonged to the king; and wine, brandy, and tobacco contributed a duty of ten per cent. During a long course of years, these were the only imposts. The king, also, retained the exclusive right of the fur trade at Tadoussac. A vast tract of wilderness extending from St. Paul’s Bay to a point eighty leagues down the St. Lawrence, and stretching indefinitely northward towards Hudson’s Bay, formed a sort of royal preserve, whence every settler was rigidly excluded. The farmers of the revenue had their trading-houses at Tadoussac, whither the northern tribes, until war, pestilence, and brandy consumed them, brought every summer a large quantity of furs. When, in 1674, the West India Company, to whom these imposts had been granted, was extinguished, the king resumed possession of them. The various duties, along with the trade of Tadoussac, were now farmed out to one Oudiette and his associates, who paid the Crown three hundred and fifty thousand livres for their privilege. * * The annual return to the king from the ferme du Canada was, for some years, 119,000 francs (livres). Out of this were paid from 35,000 to 40,000 francs a year for “ordinary charges.” The governor, intendant, and all troops except the small garrisons of Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers, were paid from other sources. There was a time when the balance must have been in the king’s favor; but profit soon changed to loss, owing partly to wars, partly to the confusion into which the beaver trade soon fell. “His Majesty,” writes the minister to the governor in 1698, “may soon grow tired of a colony which, far from yielding him any profit, costs him immense sums every year.”