[Footnote 74:  Description de l’Acadie, avec le Nom des Paroisses et le Nombre des Habitants, 1748.  Memoire a presenter a la Cour sur la necessite de fixer les Limites de l’Acadie, par l’Abbe de l’Isle-Dieu, 1753 (1754?).  Compare the estimates in Censuses of Canada (Ottawa, 1876.)]

Although, by the twelfth article of the treaty of Utrecht, France had solemnly declared the Acadians to be British subjects, the Government of Louis XV intrigued continually to turn them from subjects into enemies.  Before me is a mass of English documents on Acadian affairs from the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle to the catastrophe of 1755, and above a thousand pages of French official papers from the archives of Paris, memorials, reports, and secret correspondence, relating to the same matters.  With the help of these and some collateral lights, it is not difficult to make a correct diagnosis of the political disease that ravaged this miserable country.  Of a multitude of proofs, only a few can be given here; but these will suffice.

It was not that the Acadians had been ill-used by the English; the reverse was the case.  They had been left in free exercise of their worship, as stipulated by treaty.  It is true that, from time to time, there were loud complaints from French officials that religion was in danger, because certain priests had been rebuked, arrested, brought before the Council at Halifax, suspended from their functions, or required, on pain of banishment, to swear that they would do nothing against the interests of King George.  Yet such action on the part of the provincial authorities seems, without a single exception, to have been the consequence of misconduct on the part of the priest, in opposing the Government and stirring his flock to disaffection.  La Jonquiere, the determined adversary of the English, reported to the bishop that they did not oppose the ecclesiastics in the exercise of their functions, and an order of Louis XV admits that the Acadians have enjoyed liberty of religion.[75] In a long document addressed in 1750 to the Colonial Minister at Versailles, Roma, an officer at Louisbourg, testifies thus to the mildness of British rule, though he ascribes it to interested motives.  “The fear that the Acadians have of the Indians is the controlling motive which makes them side with the French.  The English, having in view the conquest of Canada, wished to give the French of that colony, in their conduct towards the Acadians, a striking example of the mildness of their government.  Without raising the fortune of any of the inhabitants, they have supplied them for more than thirty-five years with the necessaries of life, often on credit and with an excess of confidence, without troubling their debtors, without pressing them, without wishing to force them to pay.  They have left them an appearance of liberty so excessive that they have not intervened in their disputes or even punished their crimes.  They have allowed them to refuse with insolence certain moderate rents payable in grain and lawfully due.  They have passed over in silence the contemptuous refusal of the Acadians to take titles from them for the new lands which they chose to occupy.[76]