r countrymen who still lived under the British flag were
chiefly the inhabitants of the district of Mines and of the valley of
the River Annapolis, who, with other less important settlements,
numbered a little more than nine thousand souls. We have shown already,
by the evidence of the French themselves, that neither they nor their
emigrant countrymen had been oppressed or molested in matters temporal
or spiritual, but that the English authorities, recognizing their value
as an industrious population, had labored to reconcile them to a change
of rulers which on the whole was to their advantage. It has been shown
also how, with a heartless perfidy and a reckless disregard of their
welfare and safety, the French Government and its agents labored to keep
them hostile to the Crown of which it had acknowledged them to be
subjects. The result was, that though they did not, like their emigrant
countrymen, abandon their homes, they remained in a state of restless
disaffection, refused to supply English garrisons with provisions,
except at most exorbitant rates, smuggled their produce to the French
across the line, gave them aid and intelligence, and sometimes disguised
as Indians, robbed and murdered English settlers. By the new-fangled
construction of the treaty of Utrecht which the French boundary
commissioners had devised,[242] more than half the Acadian peninsula,
including nearly all the cultivated land and nearly all the population
of French descent, was claimed as belonging to France, though England
had held possession of it more than forty years. Hence, according to the
political ethics adopted at the time by both nations, it would be lawful
for France to reclaim it by force. England, on her part, it will be
remembered, claimed vast tracts beyond the isthmus; and, on the same
pretext, held that she might rightfully seize them and capture
Beausejour, with the other French garrisons that guarded them.

[Footnote 240: See _ante_, Chapter 4.]

[Footnote 241: Rameau (_La France aux Colonies_, I. 63), estimates the
total emigration from 1748 to 1755 at 8,600 souls,--which number seems
much too large. This writer, though vehemently anti-English, gives the
following passage from a letter of a high French official: "que les
Acadiens emigres et en grande misere comptaient se retirer a Quebec et
demander des terres, mais il conviendrait mieux qu'ils restent ou ils
sont, afin d'avoir le voisinage de l'Acadie bien peuple et defriche