NOT LONG AFTER THE YOUNG KING LOUIS XIV
came of age, New France was given the institutions of a prov-
ince of France ( 1663)--governor, intendant and Sovereign
Council, with deputy governors and intendants at Montreal
and Trois Rivières. The current legal code of the metropolitan
capital, the Custom of Paris, hitherto informally used, now
became the official code, and as such began its evolution into
'the law of Canada.'

The new turn brought not only institutions but a new
vigour embodied in new and able men, conspicuously the
Intendant Jean Talon. Talon may have been only a sub-
ordinate of the great administrator Colbert, but the energy
with which he went at getting the settlements on their feet was
his own. His measures are well known--the valiant attempts
to set up industries such as shipbuilding and brewing, the new
villages he founded back inland from Quebec, his gallant efforts
to find wives for men who otherwise would have had indefinitely
to face the rigours of celibacy. Under this tide of initiative, the
old bad days of 'free enterprise' were left behind and the settle-
ments, thanks to public initiative, began to fuse into something
like a community. The worst of the pioneering stage was over
and men could now think of themselves not merely as French-
men overseas, but as colonials; that is, as people who, remain-
ing just as French as ever, were probably in the new world to
stay. During the generation after the establishment of the
royal province of New France, all the big things that mark a
people's life got some kind of permanent form given to them:
government, law, landholding, the kind and amount of education
deemed necessary, the relations between Church and State--
all such big matters took on the shape they were to maintain
until the English Conquest.

What is to be said of the big things can also be said of the
little, for in little things as in big, every new group of people
strives for a norm of behaviour. When this is achieved, a way

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