These licenses permitted a trader to take three canoes with as much
merchandise as they would hold. As a rule the licenses were not issued
directly to the traders themselves, but were given to the religious
institutions or to dependent widows of former royal officers. These in
turn sold them to the traders, sometimes for a thousand _livres_ or
more. The system of granting twenty-five annual licenses did not
of itself throw the door wide open for trade at the western
establishments. But as time went on the plan was much abused by the
granting of private licenses to the friends of the officials at
Quebec, and "God knows how many of these were issued," as one writer
of the time puts it. Traders often went, moreover, without any license
at all, and especially in the matter of carrying brandy into the
forest they frequently set the official orders at defiance.
This brandy question was, in fact, the great troubler in Israel. It
bulks large in every chronicle, every memoir, every _Relation_, and
in almost every official dispatch during a period of more than fifty
years. It worried the King himself; it set the officers of the Church
and State against each other; and it provoked more friction throughout
the western dominions of France than all other issues put together.
As to the ethics of the liquor traffic in New France, there was
never any serious disagreement. Even the secular authorities readily
admitted that brandy did the Indians no good, and that it would be
better to sell them blankets and kettles.
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