In 1663, on his return from his first voyage to France, Monseigneur de Laval founded the seminary of Quebec, which he named the Holy Family of the Foreign Missions. Like all great works, the beginnings of the institution were small, yet it was destined to exercise a vast and salutary influence over Canada, and at a later day to acquire wide renown as the famed Laval University. CHAPTER IX. TRADE IN INTOXICATING DRINKS.--AWFUL VISITATION OF DIVINE ANGER.-- REPENTANCE.--NEW ERA OF PROSPERITY.--THE MARQUIS OF TRACY VICEROY. If association with Europeans had been in some respects a blessing to the Indians, it must be owned that in others it had proved very much the reverse. Among the numerous emigrants to Canada, were necessarily a large proportion of self-interested fortune seekers, who in order to secure a lucrative traffic with the natives, availed largely of their well-known propensity for strong drinks. The severest regulations, and the utmost vigilance of the authorities, though successful for a time, were powerless to repress the destructive trade permanently. After a short interruption, it was renewed, now clandestinely, now more openly, but as it seemed irrepressibly. The savage in a state of intoxication becomes an ungovernable maniac, who in the violence of his fury will rush into any excess and commit any crime. At the epoch which our history has now reached, the terrible vice threatened to demoralize the entire country, and to destroy the fruit of all the efforts made to convert the savages. Writing to her son on the subject, the Mother of the Incarnation says, "We have at present to contend with an evil far more calamitous in its results, than even the hostility of the Iroquois. It is unhappily but too true, that this country now harbours Frenchmen, who for their own selfish ends deliberately risk the spiritual ruin of the Indians, giving them in exchange for their beaver skins, those intoxicating liquors which are the absolute destruction of men, women, and even children." "To satisfy this insane craving for drink," Father Lalemant adds, "the savage will reduce himself to beggary; nay, will sell his own children. My ink is not dark enough," he continues, "to describe in their true colours, the calamities thus entailed on this infant church; the gall of the dragon would be more appropriate for the purpose. Suffice it to say, that in one month, we lose the fruit of our labours of ten or twenty years."