"The Acadians 
known whether England or France owned 
Acadia, or might even have supposed they 
owned it themselves. 
Not being left to themselves, however, they 
were instructed on the one hand to take the 
oath of allegiance to England, which in all 
probability they would have done quite will- 
ingly, only that, on the other hand, their 
priests told them not to. Very naturally, they 
obeyed their priests. What was the command 
of a distant and unseen power to them, com- 
pared to the actual words and personal pres- 
ence of their spiritual advisers '^. 
Their spiritual advisers should have known 
better than to involve this innocent and igno- 
rant peasantry in so absurdly unequal a con- 
test as a war with the English Government. 
But pawns were needed in the great Game 
of Governments, and the Acadians made very 
good ones. 
The chief figure of these unfortunate times 
is the unenviable one of Louis Joseph Le 
Loutre, vicar-general of Acadia and mission- 
ary to the Micmac Indians. He flourished in 
the middle of the eighteenth century and was 
to an extent the cause of the expulsion of the 
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