till a
hankering after their old habitations: the temporary new ones were far
from being equally agreeable or convenient; and even the ancient
settlers in those places where these refugees were provisionally
cantoned, began to make complaints of their encroaching upon them, and
to represent their apprehensions of their becoming burthensome to them.
Some of our people in power, more sollicitous for their own private
interest, than for the public good, were but too remiss in relieving and
comforting these poor people. This, at length, indisposed them so, that
after very pathetic remonstrances on the hardship of their case, and the
motives upon which they thus suffered, great numbers of them began to
listen seriously to the proposals made them by the English, to return
upon very inviting terms to the settlements they had quitted. In short,
it required the utmost art of the missionaries, and even a kind of
coercion from the military power, to keep them from accepting the
English offers. For when they presented a petition to Mons. _de Vergor_,
for leave to return to the English district, this commander, after
having remonstrated to them that he could not grant their request, nor
decide any thing of himself in a matter of that importance, was forced,
at length, to declare to them, that he would _shoot_ any man who should
attempt to go over to the English. [It should here be remarked, that
these very people had taken the oath of allegiance to the crown of
England, agreeable to the tenor of the treaty of Utrecht. But the
French, not content with harbouring these causeless malecontents, that
were actually deserters over to them, kept continually, by means of the
priests, plying such as staid behind with exhortations, promises,
menaces, in short, with every art of seduction, to engage them to
withdraw their sworn allegiance to their now lawful sovereign. In short,
if all the transactions of the French in those parts were thrown into a
history, it would lay open to the world such a scene of complicated
villainy, rebellion, perjury, subornation of perjury, perfidiousness,
and cruelty, as would for ever take from that nation the power of
pluming itself, as it now so impudently does, on its sincerity,
fairness, and moderation. The English, on the other hand, too conscious
of the justice of their cause at bottom, have been too remiss in their
confutation of the French falsities: content with being in the right,
they cared too little fo