Sire, the state of Your Majesty’s finances has caused me to do a close study to find the reasons for the changes I have observed….Everything I tell Your Majesty on this subject is based upon nine years’ experience in a rather successful administration….

[Colbert goes on to review how during the past nine years taxes have been lowered and yet revenues increased through better collection methods. However, by 1670 there are bugetary shorfalls that require analysis.]

The solution would consist of three goals: increasing the amount of money in public commerce by attracting it away from the countries that have it; keeping it within the realm and preventing it from leaving; and giving men greater capacity to derive profits from it. In these three points lie the grandeur and power of the state and the magnificence of the king, because of the expenditures that great revenues will allow him to make. And he will be all the more exalted in that this process will simultaneously humble neighboring states.

[Colbert list all of the commodities that are imported into France mainly by the Dutch and English and only take away wine and wheat.]… the Dutch, English, Hamburgers, and other nations brought a much greater quantity of merchandise into the realm than they took away and withdrew the surplus in circulating coin, causing both their own affluence and this realm’s poverty, and indisputably enhancing their power while promoting our weakness.

In addition, to keep the Dutch from profiting from the American islands, which they had seized and from which they had excluded the French, Your Majesty established the West Indies Company, in which he has to date invested four million….It is with foreign competition in mind that Your Majesty has worked to make the Aube, Lot, Tarn, Agout, Drome, and Baise Rivers navigable and has considerably increased navigation on the Seine, Marne, Allier, Garonne, Somme, and other rivers. He is also expending great care and money to repair his ports…and is having work done on that grand project, the construction of a canal connection the seas [the Canal des Deux Mers which connects the Atlantic and the Mediterranean], which has always been one of the greatest ambitions of the greatest princes in the world, but which had to wait for Your Majesty to see its realization. All these great projects and an infinity of others are in a certain sense novelties, whose realization Your Majesty ordered seven or eight years ago. They are still in infancy and can only be brought to perfection with hard work and stubborn effort. They can survive only as long as the state is prosperous, since considerable expenditures will always be necessary to support all this graet machinery….