esources, were no longer in a state to return to the woods where they
would have died of hunger."

Evidently it was part of the settled policy of Lawrence and his
advisers to keep the Acadians out of the province and to people it
with English speaking inhabitants, and with this policy General
Amherst seems to have been in accord, for he wrote the Governor of
Nova Scotia, "The pass you mention the two hundred Inhabitants of St.
John's River to have from Mr. Monckton, was by no means meant or
understood to give the French any right to those lands; and you have
done perfectly right not to suffer them to continue there, and you
will be equally right in sending them, when an opportunity offers, to
Europe as Prisoners of War."

And yet it was very natural that, after the surrender of Quebec, the
Acadians should believe that upon accepting the new regime and taking
the oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain they would be
treated in the same way as the French Canadians. The Abbe Casgrain
says, not without reason, that the Acadians had an even greater right
than the Canadians to clemency at the hands of their conquerors as
their sufferings were greater: ["Ils y avaient d'autant plus de droit
qu'ils avaient plus souffert."]

The expulsion at so late a period as this of two hundred Acadians from
the Valley of the River St. John, where they had vainly hoped to
remain in peace, is an incident of some importance. There is an
unpublished letter of the Jesuit missionary Germain to the Marquis de
Vaudreuil, written at Aukpaque on the River St. John, under date
February 26, 1760, which is of some interest in this connection. "I
arrived at the River St. John," writes Father Germain, "on All Saints
Day (Nov. 1, 1759), where I unfortunately found all the inhabitants
had gone down to the English fort with their families, which made me
resolve to go and join them, as I did eight days afterwards, with the
intention of accompanying them wherever they might be sent in order to
help them--some to die as Christians in the transport ships and others
to be of good cheer in the calamity that has befallen them as it did
their brethren who are exiles in New England. But by a stroke of
Providence, Monsieur Coquart, missionary to the French, arrived, and I
desired the commandant to give me leave to retire which he granted
together with a passport permitting me to remain at the priests' house
in my mission where I am now."[46]

[46] I am