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believed them either banished or dead. The exact estimate of the population, in 1764, is rather that of the census, instituted at the request of the Massachusetts Historical society, two thousand six hundred souls.

An official census, taken in 1767, gives only 1265 Acadians for all the Maritime Provinces; 1068 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and 197 in Isle St. Jean. This decrease, of more than half the total population, taking place after the treaty of Paris (1763) and the re-establishment of universal peace, and notwithstanding the return of a certain number of the banished, throws a hideous light on this persecution without end or intermission.

Thus, in 1767 the whole race, with the exception of 1,265 persons, had disappeared; the peaceable Acadian people had been consigned to the tomb; and total suppression had apparently overtaken those whom Lawrence, in his report to the Lords of Trade, styles "inveterate enemies of our religion." Henceforward the despoilers might feel at ease; their work was consummate; French Acadia whose very archives had been, or were about to be destroyed, was surely dead: finis Acadiæ.

But let us draw the curtain over this pitiable tableau.

My purpose in recalling the events of 1755, is not to evoke revolting memories that cluster around our disappearance from among the peoples; still less to rouse sentiments of enmity against our persecutors of that period. M. Edward Richard has undertaken to prove—unfortunately it is the least authoritative portion of his masterly work—that the spoliation and expulsion of the Acadians occurred without the assent of the British cabinet, that the governors of Halifax and their greedy hangers-on are alone accountable therefor.