Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/166

pathetic writers entertained the same opinion. In the introduction to his work on the second centenary of the foundation of the Quebec diocese (1874), M. Chauveau, speaking of the Acadians, wrote in set terms that, even then, their existence was almost ignored in the province of Quebec; and M. Bourassa, in the prologue to his Acadian romance, "Jacques et Marie," published in 1864, tells his readers "Providence has allowed the Acadians to disappear."

According to all appearances, such was, and such should have been the case.

From the time of the cession of their country to England by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, the Acadians seemed to be a people fatally doomed to the hatred of men and the curse of God. Everything the English undertake against them, even under the most unfavora ble conditions, as, for instance, the siege of Louisbourg in 1745, succeeds beyond all hopes; everything that. France, Canada, the Indians, the missionaries attempt. for the salvation of Acadia turns to her loss. The very virtues of the Acadians,—their peaceable disposition, their love of labor, their economical habits, their sentiment of honor, their scrupulous observance of their word once given, the sacredness of their oaths, all become for them so many ambushes, serve their enemies. as pretexts for oppressing them, precipitate the cataclysm that was to engulf them. War and peace they find equally disastrous. Up to 1864, their history would. justify a thousand times over, in the eyes of Mohammedans, the law of fatality: Kismet, it was written!

One clause of the treaty of Utrecht grants them a year in which to dispose of their effects and retire to French territory. The governors of Annapolis, and then those of Halifax, twist this clause until it becomes an inextricable tangle in which the poor Acadians are caught. When, in 1755, they finally escape from it,