thful
instruments of the exclusive policy of their government, would not
permit it, and were so vigilant that he could not elude them. At the
same time, to his vexation, he found that the King's officers in
Louisiana, with more address or better luck, and in contempt of his
monopoly, which it was their business to protect, carried on, for their
own profit, a small smuggling trade with Vera Cruz. He complained that
they were always thwarting his agents and conspiring against his
interests. At last, finding no resource left but an unprofitable trade
with the Indians, he gave up his charter, which had been a bane to the
colony and a loss to himself. Louisiana returned to the Crown, and was
soon passed over to the new Mississippi Company, called also the Western
Company.[309]

That charlatan of genius, the Scotchman John Law, had undertaken, with
the eager support of the Regent Duke of Orleans, to deliver France from
financial ruin through a prodigious system of credit, of which
Louisiana, with its imaginary gold mines, was made the basis. The
government used every means to keep up the stock of the Mississippi
Company. It was ordered that the notes of the royal bank and all
certificates of public debt should be accepted at par in payment for its
shares. Powers and privileges were lavished on it. It was given the
monopoly of the French slave-trade, the monopoly of tobacco, the profits
of the royal mint, and the farming of the revenues of the kingdom.
Ingots of gold, pretending to have come from the new Eldorado of
Louisiana, were displayed in the shop-windows of Paris. The fever of
speculation rose to madness, and the shares of the company were inflated
to monstrous and insane proportions.

When Crozat resigned his charter, Louisiana, by the highest estimates,
contained about seven hundred souls, including soldiers, but not blacks
or Indians. Crozat's successors, however, say that the whole number of
whites, men, women, and children, was not above four hundred.[310] When
the Mississippi Company took the colony in charge, it was but a change
of despots. Louisiana was a prison. But while no inhabitant could leave
it without permission of the authorities, all Jews were expelled, and
all Protestants excluded. The colonists could buy nothing except from
the agents of the company, and sell nothing except to the same
all-powerful masters, always at prices fixed by them. Foreign vessels
were forbidden to enter any port of Louisian