t? Is it the
officers who command the posts, or is it the storekeepers? You give me
no particulars. What has become of the immense quantity of provisions
sent to Canada last year? I am forced to conclude that the King's stores
are set down as consumed from the moment they arrive, and then sold to
His Majesty at exorbitant prices. Thus the King buys stores in France,
and then buys them again in Canada. I no longer wonder at the immense
fortunes made in the colony."[567] Some months later the Minister
writes: "You pay bills without examination, and then find an error in
your accounts of three million six hundred thousand francs. In the
letters from Canada I see nothing but incessant speculation in
provisions and goods, which are sold to the King for ten times more than
they cost in France. For the last time, I exhort you to give these
things your serious attention, for they will not escape from mine."[568]

[Footnote 567: _Le Ministre a Bigot, 19 Jan. 1759._]

[Footnote 568: _Ibid., 29 Aout, 1759._]

"I write, Monsieur, to answer your last two letters, in which you tell
me that instead of sixteen millions, your drafts on the treasury for
1758 will reach twenty-four millions, and that this year they will rise
to from thirty-one to thirty-three millions. It seems, then, that there
are no bounds to the expenses of Canada. They double almost every year,
while you seem to give yourself no concern except to get them paid. Do
you suppose that I can advise the King to approve such an
administration? or do you think that you can take the immense sum of
thirty-three millions out of the royal treasury by merely assuring me
that you have signed drafts for it? This, too, for expenses incurred
irregularly, often needlessly, always wastefully; which make the fortune
of everybody who has the least hand in them, and about which you know
so little that after reporting them at sixteen millions, you find two
months after that they will reach twenty-four. You are accused of having
given the furnishing of provisions to one man, who under the name of
commissary-general, has set what prices he pleased; of buying for the
King at second or third hand what you might have got from the producer
at half the price; of having in this and other ways made the fortunes of
persons connected with you; and of living in splendor in the midst of a
public misery, which all the letters from the colony agree in ascribing
to bad administration, and in charging M.