1690-97.] NEEDLESS BARBARITY. 373 



the only one of the New England colonies which 

 took an aggressive part in the contest. Connecti- 

 cut did little or nothing. Rhode Island was non- 

 combatant through Quaker influence ; and New 

 Hampshire was too weak for offensive war. Massa- 

 chusetts was in no condition to fight, nor was she 

 impelled to do so by the home government. Can- 

 ada was organized for war, and must fight at the 

 bidding of the king, who made the war and paid 

 for it. Massachusetts was organized for peace ; and, 

 if she chose an aggressive part, it was at her own 

 risk and her own cost. She had had fi editing; 

 enough already against infuriated savages far more 

 numerous than the Iroquois, and poverty and po- 

 litical revolution made peace a necessity to her. 

 If there was danger of another attack on Quebec, 

 it was not from New England, but from Old ; and 

 no amount of frontier butchery could avert it. 



Nor, except their inveterate habit of poaching 

 on Acadian fisheries, had the people of New Eng- 

 land provoked these barbarous attacks. They 

 never even attempted to retaliate them, though 

 the settlements of Acadia offered a safe and easy 

 revenge. Once, it is true, they pillaged Beau- 

 bassin ; but they killed nobody, though countless 

 butcheries in settlements yet more defenceless were 

 fresh in their memory. 1 



1 The people of Beaubassin had taken an oath of allegiance to Eng- 

 land in 1690, and pleaded it as a reason for exemption from plunder; but 

 it appears by French authorities that they had violated it ( Observations 

 sur les Depeches touchant VAcadie, 1695), and their priest Baudoin had led 

 a band of Micmacs to the attack of Wells ( Villebon, Journal). When tho 

 " Bostonnais " captured Port Royal, they are described by the French 

 as excessively irritated by the recent slaughter at Salmon Falls, yet the 

 only revenge they took was plundering some of the inhabitants. 



