You know
very well that there are ill-disposed and mischievous persons among you
who corrupt the others. Your inexperience, your ignorance of the affairs
of government, and your habit of following the counsels of those who
have not your real interests at heart, make it an easy matter to seduce
you. In your petitions you ask for a general leave to quit the province.
The only manner in which you can do so is to follow the regulations
already established, and provide yourselves with our passport. And we
declare that nothing shall prevent us from giving such passports to all
who ask for them, the moment peace and tranquillity are
re-established."[104] He declares as his reason for not giving them at
once, that on crossing the frontier "you will have to pass the French
detachments and savages assembled there, and that they compel all the
inhabitants who go there to take up arms" against the English. How well
this reason was founded will soon appear.
[Footnote 104: The above passages are from two address of Cornwallis,
read to the Acadian deputies in April and May, 1750. The combined
extracts here given convey the spirit of the whole. See _Public
Documents of Nova Scotia_, 185-190.]
Hopson, the next governor, described by the French themselves as a "mild
and peaceable officer," was no less considerate in his treatment of the
Acadians; and at the end of 1752 he issued the following order to his
military subordinates: "You are to look on the French inhabitants in the
same light as the rest of His Majesty's subjects, as to the protection
of the laws and government; for which reason nothing is to be taken from
them by force, or any price set upon their goods but what they
themselves agree to.
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