take a simple oath of fidelity and loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation that they would not be required for the present to bear arms.[119] When Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and preached himself into a state of exhaustion.[120] The military commandant at Beausejour used gentler means of prevention; and the Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves, remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for them the question, under which king?

[Footnote 119:  Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 205, 209.]

[Footnote 120:  Compare Memoires, 1749-1760, and Public Documents of Nova Scotia, 229, 230.]

Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries between France and England in America had been in session at Paris, waging interminable war on paper; La Galissoniere and Silhouette for France, Shirley and Mildmay for England.  By the treaty of Utrecht, Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia?  According to the English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St. Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.[121] The French commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness.  When the French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self.  The denial that Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only with the eastern portions in French hands.  So new was this denial that even La Galissoniere himself, the foremost in making it, had declared without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire peninsula.[122] “If,” says a writer on the question, “we had to do with a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us.”  He thinks that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in order to gain some other point by yielding this one.[123] It is curious that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably called the inhabitants Acadians.  Innumerable public documents, commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a part of Maine.  Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early French maps.  Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its possession by an alien.