o keep the morals of the people pure and
uncorrupted, and for the encouragement of piety and virtue and the
suppression of vice and immorality, it was provided that "no Stage
Plays, Horse-racing, Cock-fighting, Balls and Assemblies, Profane
swearing and cursing, Sabbath-breaking, Drunkenness, nocturnal
revelling, whoredom, Cards, Dice, and all other games whatsoever,
commonly called Games of Chance (Lotteries ordered by the Legislature
to raise money for public uses excepted) shall be permitted."

The would-be founders of New Ireland close their report by expressing
their hope that Europeans, panting after the sweets of Liberty and
Independence will flock thither. "Here," say they, "are no griping and
racking Landlords to oppress you; no avaricious Priests to extort from
you the Tenth of all your increase and labors and whom you must pay
for the liberty to come into the world, of being married, of having
children and likewise of leaving the world. * * * Send here the frugal
and industrious; no half Gentlemen with long pedigrees from Nimrod and
Cain, nor any who expect to make their fortunes by any other methods
than the plain beaten paths of honest industry, for idle indolent
people, unwilling to work, ought not to eat but to live in all places
miserable."

But to return from this digression; it is clear that if the British
forces had routed John Allan and his Indians out of Machias in 1779,
as they might easily have done if a serious effort had been made, the
American congress would then have had no foothold east of Saco, so
that Portland and all the coast to the St. Croix would have been, at
the close of the war, as firmly in the possession of the English as
any part of Nova Scotia. The American writer Kidder, in his
interesting account of the military operations in eastern Maine and
Nova Scotia during the Revolution, says: "It is now generally conceded
that our present boundary was fixed mainly on the ground of
occupation, and had we not been able to hold our eastern outpost at
Machias, we cannot say what river in Maine would now divide us from a
British province."

CHAPTER XXVI.

WHITE CHIEFS AND INDIAN CHIEFS.

In the year 1779 many of the Indians at Machias and Passamaquoddy
began to waver in their adherence to the Americans and to imagine they
would fare better by withdrawing from John Allan and returning to
their old haunts on the River St. John. Allan wrote in the autumn of
this year, "The unstea