ON CAPE BRETON. 231 



large a body ol' people, uudoubtedly, and naturally, in sympathy with the French, had 

 always created among the English colonists, was not only intensified by the obstinacy of 

 the Acadians in this particular, but by the knowledge that a number of them had been 

 actually captured at Fort Beauséjour with arms in their hands. The people of England 

 were much prejudiced against them, and believed that they could never enjoy any security 

 while the Acadians continued to maintain their attitude of nominal neutrality, but actually 

 of secret hostility to England. They had always supplied Louisbourg with provisions 

 and helped to build the French forts on the isthmus, and it was difficult for Lawrence 

 and his officers to obtain any assistance from them in the same way. The war betM'een 

 the French and English had never really ceased in America, and it was well known that 

 the hollow truce in Europe would be broken at any moment ; and in the presence of the 

 great danger that threatened the English colonies, they had some ground for fearing the 

 presence of a large body of people who assumed the extraordinary and unjustifiable posi- 

 tion of neutrals in a coi^ntry which was England's by rights of conquest and treaty, and 

 where they could and did enjoy an amount of political and religious liberty which no 

 Protestant enjoyed in Catholic Europe. The English authorities refused to allow them 

 time to remove to French territory under the natural fear that such a step would only 

 directly strengthen the French in Canada. The position of this people in Acadia, it is well 

 to remember, would have been very different from that afterwards occupied by the French 

 Canadians during the war of independence. In the one case it was a war between Eng- 

 land and their old mother France, and it would have been difficult for them to refuse to 

 listen to emissaries, who would be certainly urging them to take up arms for the restora- 

 tion of the old régime. Their neutrality, under all the circumstances of the case, would 

 have been extremely trying ; indeed, in this last supreme struggle their hearts would 

 lead them to take a part. In the second case, France had disappeared to all intents and 

 purposes from the new world, and the war was between England and her own children 

 in America, and there was no possible hope of restoring the old days of French dominion, 

 but, on the contrary, the people saw in the Quebec Act the evidence of a unanimous 

 desire to treat them justly. But while there are some extenuating circumstances to miti- 

 gate the unfavourable verdict which history seems generally disposed to pass against the 

 English authorities for this hasty exj^atriation of the Acadian Frenth from their homes in 

 their old Acadian land where they had been living since the days of De Poutrincourt and 

 La Tour, one will always regret that the men who represented England in those days had 

 not run a risk on the side of human clemency, rather than have driven thousands of 

 men, women and children from their pleasant homes by the sides of the beautiful bays 

 and rivers of Nova Scotia, and scattered them far and wide among the English colonies, 

 where they were so many sad-hearted exiles and unwelcome strangers, to whom charity 

 too often doled out a pittance with a reluctant hand. 



In 1756 the war between France and England was publicly proclaimed. In Europe 

 the four great powers of France, Spain, Russia and Austria combined to crush Frederick 

 the Great, whose sole ally was England. The basis of the present Grerman Empire was 

 laid on the field of Rossbach where the great representative of Protestantism defeated and 



never made by anyone in authority ; and in the two instances in wliich it was apparently granted by subordinate 

 officers, their action was repudiated by their superiors." " Nar. and Crit. Hist, of Am.," art. on " The Struggle in 

 Acadia and Cape Breton," v. 409. 



