The manufactures of this neglected though splendid colony scarcely merit even a passing notice. Flax and hemp were worked only sufficiently to show how much was lost in their neglect, and the clothing of this simple peasantry was chiefly of a coarse gray woollen stuff, the produce of their own wheels and looms. At the forges of St. Maurice, near Three Rivers, indeed, iron works were carried on with some skill, and profit to the employed, if not to the employers. The commercial spirit of the French, such as it was, the fur trade almost wholly engrossed; the fisheries were never carried on with any vigor by the colonists; some adventurers, indeed, from the home ports, bore the produce of the northern waters, with Canadian timber and provisions, to the tropical islands, but even this limited trade was monopolized by a privileged few, through the corrupt connivance of the authorities. In the official returns of the colonial customs, there appears every year an enormous surplus of imports over exports, which can only be accounted for by the clandestine shipment of great quantities of furs and other goods, to restore in some measure the necessary balance of exchange. The sole view of the local officials was rapidly to accumulate wealth at the expense of the state or of their Canadian fellow-subjects; such of their books and accounts as fell into the hands of the English were so confused and irregular that it was difficult or impossible to discover the exact nature of their undoubted dishonesty. The French East India company enjoyed the exclusive privilege of exporting the valuable furs of the beaver; they had therefore an agent, director, and controller in each separate government of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec. A stated price was fixed for each skin, and on the hunter presenting it at the store, he received a receipt which became current in the colony as money, and was held to the last in higher estimation than the notes of the royal treasury. It has already been stated that bills of exchange to an immense amount on the government of France were afloat in the colony at a considerable depreciation; in the emergency of the year 1759, they ceased to be negotiable at any price.