THE CRIME AGAINST AOADIA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 17, 15 August 1884, Page 23

THE CRIME AGAINST AOADIA.

Under the title " Acadia ; a Lost Chapter in American. History," Mr. Philip H. Smith has published a work of thrilling interest and great historical value. It is the story of the wrongs inflicted by England on the unhappy peasants of Acadia, a story better known through Longfellow's beautiful poem than in the prosaic pages of history. The Knglish historian glosses over the blackest features of the horrible crime. The American finds nothing in it to palliate his country's complicity. The Acadians at tbe time of their expulsion had done nothing to deserve any punishment, least of all the atrocious sentence passed upon them by the English governor of Nova Scotia, and carried out with every circumstance of fiendish cruelty. They aad their fathers had loyally served their French, rulers, but when French arms had been overcome in America they accepted the fortunes of war and honourably kept their pledge of submission to the conqueror. By express treaty they took an oath of fealty to the King of Great Britain, limited by the stipulation that they should not be required to bear arms against France. When it served her purpose England coolly disregarded this agreement, and insisted on an unconditional oath of allegiance. Tbe infamous breach of tbe Treaty of Limerick had its counterpart under similar circumstances in Acadia. The honourable Frenchmen, finding remonstrance unavailing, then demanded the pledged alternative of deportation to France. Ibis also was denied them. They were told that they might take the oath of unconditional allegiance or to be expelled whithersoever the conqueror chose t© send them. To enforce his decision he seized 400 of the inhabitants as hostages for the submission of all the people. Then followed what Lossing pronounces " one of the most fearful crimes which have sometimes stained the annals of nationß." A brutal and licentious soldiery were turned loose to burn, profane and destroy the habitations an 4 churches, to bunt down like wild beasts tbe unoffending, helpless people, and banish them to an exile worse than death. Husbands and wives were separated, children were torn from their parents, and in ignorance of each other's fates or destinations, transported with rigorous cruelty to foreign and inhospitable shores. Eighteen thousand Acadians were thus scattered among the colonies of America, from Massachusetts to Georgia, and even to faroff Louisiana ; to starve and die among people of a foreign race, creed and tongue, who distrusted them with the old unreasoning Provincial distrust ot " Papists," and bated them with the centuriesold hatred of the English for the French. The atrocities of African slavery make a parallel on a small scale' ; Cromwell's mthless kidnapping and consigning to slavery of Irish youth equal on a large scale this gigantic crime against God and humanity. "No pen can depict its horrors, and no excuse can mitigate its atrocity. For the French, although no less barbarous than their enemies, were not the aggressors in the long and bloody wars on this continent, when the ruthless savage took part against the British colonists only to be outdone by them in cold-blooded treachery and barbarity. The pages of this book, written by an unbiassed American, abound in recitals of cruelty and duplicity towards both Indian and Frenchman, and record the bounties for scalps paid by the Massachussetts Government, specified in the same instructions which ordered the civilised marauders "to have prayers on ship daily, to sanctify the Sabbath, and to forbidall profane swearing and drunkenness." The bounty for a male Indian over twelve years old was £105, if taken alive, and £100, if scalped ; women and children were worth £50, scalped or brought in alive I 'Time and the infusion of foreign blood have refined tbe character of the people whose English ancestors practised such barbarity. The crime against Acadia would be impossible to-day in this country, a sufficient evidence that the " Anglo-Saxon " origin is only a tradition and a memory. The real Anglo-Americans, to the number of 20,000 Tory loyalists, twenty years afterwards, abandonedtheir liberated country and took refuge in the land whence they had helped to dispossess the hapless Acadians. The curse of obscurity and decay has rested on the fatal soil ever since.— Pilot.