Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/45

 The Office of hitendant in Neio France 3 5 Year by year the intendant sent home itemized accounts showing particulars of revenue and expenditure.' 4ooUo4; The intendant also acted as the general distributing and purchas- ing agent of the crown in the colony. It was customary, each au- tumn, to send home a list of the stores required for the maintenance of the forces in the country ; and these supplies the home government forwarded in the following spring. On arrival at Quebec such stores were distributed under the supervision of the intendant to the var- ious royal storekeepers, from whom they could be had by officers commanding the forces on presentation of the necessary requisitions. Since, however, the demand could not always be accurately stated in advance, it very frequently happened that things were needed which had not been sent out from France. In such cases the neces- sary supplies were purchased in the colony. The method of secur- ing these differed somewhat from time to time, but during the last few decades preceding the loss of Canada it was the practice to per- mit officers commanding military posts or military expeditions to secure such additional supplies from merchants or traders by giving signed requisitions in return. These requisitions were then signed by the merchant, the local commissary, the commissary-general, and fin- ally by the intendant, who made payment either in money or by giv- ing bills of exchange on Paris — usually in the latter way. Th'^ requisitions were then kept by the intendant as vouchers, but there seems to have been no regular system of auditing them. Still, they passed through so many hands that fraud or extortion was scarcely possible without collusion on the part of several officials. - Down to 1748 it does not appear that there w-as any marked corruption or dishonesty among the civil officials of the colony;^ but with the arrival of Bigot in that year a veritable carnival of pecu- lation was inaugurated. Bigot proceeded to fill all the subordinate offices with men as dishonest as himself, so that fraudulent requisi- ' Many of these are preserved in the Correspondance Generale. They are, however, very complicated and difficult to analyze. ^ Different intendants varied the system of distributing and purchasing sup- plies to such an extent that it is not easy to give an accurate outline of the methods pursued. Many details are given in the Mcmoire pour Messire Frangois Bigot, ci-devant Intendant de Justice, Police, Finance, ct Marine en Canada (Paris, 1763), especially in part in.: in Antoine de Bougainville's " Memoire sur I'Etat de la Nouvelle France, a I'fipoque de la Guerre de Sept Ans ", printed by Pierre Margry in his Relations et Mcmoires Incdits (Paris. iSe?!, 37-84; and in the various despatches of Montcalm, Vaudreuil, and Bigot during the years preceding the conquest. 3 An anonymous " Memoire sur I'Etat present du Canada ", dated February 15, 1712, and preserved in the .rchives of the Marine, accuses the intendant, Jacques Raudot. of carrying on a private trade in wheat and salt.. Correspon- dance Generale. XXXIII. 381. Complaints of this sort were, however, very rare.