[RAYMOND] NOVA SCOTIA UNDER ENGLISH RULE 75 
some difficulty in arriving at definite conclusions upon some of the 
points involved. At the same time, a very superficial writer, if a 
partizan, will find it comparatively easy by careful selection of his 
materials to show—if it please you—either that Charles Lawrence was 
a patriotic and far-sighted administrator, or that he was an obstinate 
and brutal tyrant! But this surely is not the way to study history. 
After carefully weighing the evidence adduced by Parkman, Mur- 
doch, Hannay, Akins and Sir Adams Archibald, on the one hand, 
and by Haliburton, Savary, Casgrain, Richard, Poirier and Gaudet, on 
the other; and after a careful study of the publications of the Nova 
Scotia Historical Society, the transcripts in the Archives department 
at Ottawa, and other available evidence, the following points seem, 
to the writer of this paper to be fairly well established :— 
1. That after the ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, 
the Acadians were repeatedly urged by the French commanders and 
their priests to abandon their lands in the peninsula of Nova Scotia, 
but were very reluctant to do so. 
2. That, although the English governors endeavoured to hinder 
their desertion of the peninsula, the weakness of the garrison at Anna- 
polis Royal was such that the Acadians could readily have found oppor- 
tunity to retire to Isle Royale, or to some other place under French 
jurisdiction, had they so desired.* 
3. That finding the Acadians were of service to the colony and 
that their removal would strengthen the French at Louisbourg and 
elsewhere, the governors of Nova Scotia became anxious to retain 
them within the province, and, having failed to induce them to take 
an unconditional oath of allegiance, adopted a temporizing policy and 
permitted them to remain as “ Neutrals.” 
4. That the circumstances of the age rendered it well nigh im- 
possible to separate religious creed and national policy; it was, there- 
fore, natural that the French missionaries should join hands with the 
military authorities in their endeavour to keep the Acadians in a state 
of hostility to the English—the Abbé le Loutre even threatening to set 
the Indians upon them and to place them under the ban of the church 
if they dared to take the oath of allegiance. 
5. That Lawrence and Shirley shared the unfavourable opinion 
entertained by the English in America with regard to the Acadians 
as old-time allies of the savages, suspecting them (perhaps unjustly) 
of being instigators of their barbarities, and believing them to be in- 
imical to British rule and ready at the first convenient opportunity to 
be openly hostile. 
1 See on this head Parkman’s Half Century of Conflict, Vol. I, p. 189. 
