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 94 Canadian trade. [ma- way to the French treasury. In peaceful and plentiful years the colony was able to export 80,000 minots of flour and biscuit. The settlements improved as the traveller went westward ; below Quebec there was little cultivation. The steady movement westward to a warmer climate and more fertile cornlands was not supplied by French emigrants, as de la Gallissoniere hoped it might be, but by the Canadians themselves. The number of hunters in the upper country, who could not be relied upon as part of the militia, had steadily increased to some 8000, and almost every colonist was more or less engaged in trading with the Indians. During the years of peace that followed the Treaty of Utrecht, a road was opened from Quebec to Montreal, and the fortifications of both towns were increased. For this purpose the first direct tax was levied by the authority of the Crown on the inhabitants of the two towns. Quebec numbered about 8000, and though the shores of the river were closely settled by farmers as far as Montreal, the town population of Quebec and Montreal tended to increase more quickly than that of the country. The communication with France was annual only, and not half-yearly as Colbert had hoped to make it. Every October, when the French fleet sailed for home, the paper and card money of the colony was converted into bills of exchange payable in France. The power of creating paper money, which was put in the hands of the intendant, opened the way for the gravest malversations; and after Bigot's peculations and the stoppage of payment of Canadian bills, a loss of some four million livres in circulation fell on the habitants (1759). The years that passed between the Treaty of Utrecht and the war of 1745, in spite of much sound legislation by the Council, saw few new industries develop. At Three Rivers some iron-working was begun by a solitary blacksmith, and the timber-trade, the whale-fishery, the salt-meat and wool trade were greatly neglected. The hope of making Canada a succurscde for ship-building which Colbert had fostered, had been kept up by a royal dockyard at Quebec, where the King kept a constructor-in-chief. A memoir of 1758 states that the yard was then run down and about to be stopped on the ground that vessels built there cost more than in France, and that Canadian wood was unsuitable. There is evidence of grave mismanagement. Even the building of boats for fishing-stations and for the river-trade was neglected, and canoes were obtained from the English at cheaper rates. The colony still maintained its preeminence as taking the lead in discovery. The journey of Gautier de la Verendrye (1746-49), who penetrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba and the Saskatchewan, and, it is said, though on doubtful authority, to the Rocky Mountains, was an expedition after the old pattern in which Canadians had always distinguished themselves. The military development of the colony also had fallen but little behind in the long years of peace, although the disproportion in numbers between the Canadian militia and the British colonial militia