[Footnote 121:  The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of latitude,—­that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania.  Neither party cared to produce the document.]

[Footnote 122:  “L’Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle bornee par son isthme.” La Galissoniere au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749.  The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission.]

[Footnote 123:  Memoire de l’Abbee de l’Isle-Dieu, 1753 (1754?).]

Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called loudly for solution.  What line should separate Canada and her western dependencies from the British colonies?  Various principles of demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French side was a geographical one.  All countries watered by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to belong to her.  This would have planted her in the heart of New York and along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast.  Yet in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their farms, or their fisheries,—­in view of all this, her pretensions were moderate and reasonable compared with those of England.  The treaty of Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them belonged to the British Crown.  But what was an Iroquois conquest?  The Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran.  Their military expeditions were mere raids, great or small.  Sometimes, as in the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were gone.  But the range of their war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp.  This would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the province of Quebec,—­or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspe, Rimouski, and Bonaventure.  Indeed among the advocates of British claims there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the south side of the St. Lawrence.[124] Such being the attitude of the two contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument of kings.  Peace must be won with the sword.