Frontier settlement in Québec has been described principally in agricultural terms. However, northern development, to include such regions as Abitibi, was an expression above all of territorial aggrandizement, of a geopolitical expansion of a nation in response to the internal and external constraints imposed on it. This settlement and development of "new" regions proved, however, to be an abortive liberation in the sense that only a symbolic and not a material appropriation of space occurred (as typified by the Church and the Mine). Such frontier settlement constituted, in practice, an anglo-saxon economic conquest (colonization) of an enlarged québécois political space. The myth that has been created about this frontier (the myth of the North) has nevertheless become the founding myth of the Québec nation-state.