Captured--Wolfe Attacks Quebec--Battle of the Plains of Abraham
--Wolfe and Montcalm Mortally Wounded--Quebec Surrenders--New France a
Dream of the Past--Pontiac's War.

American history contains no sadder story than the expulsion of the
Acadians, or French settlers of Nova Scotia. The act may have been
justifiable on the ground of military necessity; the Acadians were not
loyal subjects, and they would have eagerly welcomed the expulsion of the
British from North America. Indeed their conduct might have been
construed as treasonable, and the English had ground for regarding them
as enemies of the British crown. Their dispersion weakened the French
cause at a time when that cause seemed in the ascendant, and when
Braddock's unavenged defeat had reanimated the French with the hope of
driving the English from America. Yet even if the deportation of the
Acadians was required by the supreme law of self-preservation, and
justifiable on the ground of their more than merely passive disloyalty,
the manner of that deportation could not be justified. The separation of
families, many of them never reunited, was a crime against humanity; the
conversion of an honest, industrious and thrifty peasantry into a host of
penniless vagrants, scattered like Ishmaelites through hostile colonies,
was a wrong as cruel as it was unnecessary. Colonized in South Carolina
or Georgia, the Acadians could hardly have been a menace to the power of
Great Britain, while the Huguenot element in those regions, understanding
the Acadian tongue, would have kept watch and ward against possible
disloyalty. It is a pathetic feature of this most painful episode that
the Huguenots, themselves driven out of France by the merciless tyranny
of a Roman Catholic king, gave kindly relief to such Roman Catholic
exiles from Acadia as were cast among them. They proved their true
Christian spirit by returning good for evil. About six thousand of the
Acadians were deported from their native land, and scattered the length
and breadth of the English colonies. Many made their way to Louisiana,
then a French possession, and their descendants still form a distinct
class in that State. Some even sought refuge among the Indians, and found
the barbarian kinder than their civilized persecutors. Longfellow's poem,
"Evangeline," is based on the touching story of Acadia. The French cause
was greatly strengthened by the arrival in 1756 of the Marquis de
Montcalm, a distinguished soldi