[RAYMOND] NOVA SCOTIA UNDER ENGLISH RULE 83 
and enjoyed the privileges of their religion, their priests being subject 
to no other restriction than that they were not to use their position 
to promote disloyalty on the part of their people to the Government 
under which they lived. No taxes or duties were required of them. 
Their circumstances were yearly improving and they were rapidly 
increasing in numbers. The fate to which they were doomed might 
have been avoided had Lawrence possessed greater patience or had 
they been more wisely led. 
Winslow’s journal has been published in full in the Collections of 
the Nova Scotia Historical Society. It tells the pitiful story of the 
expulsion. The number of those removed from the province is usually 
stated to have been between 6,000 and 7,000 souls. 
Proposals for placing English speaking People on the Lands formerly 
cultivated by the Acadians. 
In one particular the authors of the deportation were disappointed. 
They had hoped to substitute, almost immediately, a loyal population 
for one they had pronounced disaffected, but they failed for some time 
to find settlers for the vacant lands. The Massachusetts soldiers, to 
whom they were offered, would not stay in the province, and it was not 
until the lapse of five years that English settlers began to occupy the 
waste fields of the Acadians. This was doubtless due in a large 
measure to the war with France. 
Governor Lawrence, however, realized the importance of an im- 
mediate attempt at colonization. In his letter to Colonel Monckton, 
of August 8, 1755, he gives the following instruction:—‘ When the 
French inhabitants are removed, you will give orders that no person 
presume to take possession of any of the lands until a plan of the whole 
has been laid before me, and terms of encouragement to English 
settlers deliberately formed and made publick.” On the 18th of 
October he wrote to the Lords of Trade that the removal of the French 
had left vacant large tracts of good land, ready for immediate 
cultivation, and that he should use his best endeavours to encourage 
people from the neighbouring colonies to settle upon them. A bitter 
Indian war, however, now broke out, and the development of Acadia 
was once more at a stand. The matter of promoting the settlement 
of the country, nevertheless, had now assumed an importance in the 
eyes of the Lords of Trade that it had not heretofore possessed. They 
wrote to Governor Lawrence in July, 1756, in the following terms:— 
“As the recall of the two thousand New England troops puts an end 
to any view which might have been entertained of converting them into 
settlers upon the lands left vacant by the transportation of the French 
inhabitants, we shall remain extremely anxious till we hear what occurs 
