84 The Canadian Church. [i664- The first Canadian bishop, Laval, desired to equip a disciplined body of clergy wholly subordinate to his authority. To maintain control he proposed that the appointment of cures should be in his own hands, and that tithe should be paid to and administered by him. The question of the removability of cures was decided against him in 1679, and a fixed salary from the tithe of each district was allotted to them. But the burning question between Church and State was that of the wisdom of allowing the sale of spirits to Indians. The State officials, bent on commercial success, argued in favour of free sale that the Indians'* desire for spirits must be satisfied by the French, or they would cease to come under French influence, and would pass under the influence of those who were less scrupulous. The Jesuits dwelt on the hideous results of the trade in degrading and destroying the native tribes. Bishop Laval, finding the officials against him, decided to use his spiritual authority and made the sale of drink to natives a religious offence to be punished by excommunication. Although in the absence of the support of the Crown the Bishop had to change his policy, his point was so far gained that the liquor trade with the Indians was made illicit, but the issue of numerous licences to traders greatly reduced the value of the prohibition. Colbert's hope that a great Indian population would be converted and gradually gallicised met with no support from the Jesuits. He had looked for much intermarriage and believed that common schools for French and Indian children would be found successful. The Jesuits favoured for the Indians a system of perpetual tutelage, arguing that the Indian mind was incapable of development. They arranged permanent missions for "domiciled 1 ' Indians, but were powerless to secure that total exclusion of all outside influences which characterised the South American missions. In Colbert's correspondence with the intendant some watchfulness over the Jesuit power is recommended; but " to soften Jesuit severity the means must be gentle, imperceptible." His hope was that, as the population grew, the royal power would insensibly supersede the Jesuit. But his desire to draw the colony into a closely united whole, occupying the valley of the St Lawrence, clearing grounds only in immediate proximity to the settled parts, met with no sympathy from the Jesuit missionaries, or from the adventurous explorers who sought to enrich the colony by discovering a convenient way to the South Seas, or at the least, an outlet westwards to the sea-coast. The period of most carefully encouraged settlement was also the period of the scientific pursuit of exploration, mainly by the Jesuits. By 1669 they had pushed their mission stations westward as far as Sault St Marie, the first station on the southern bank of the lakes or the river. This, with Michillimackinac, and the Mission St Ignace,
