think or act for themselves,
remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for
them the question, under which king?

[Footnote 119: _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 205, 209.]

[Footnote 120: Compare _Memoires, 1749-1760_, and _Public Documents of
Nova Scotia_, 229, 230.]

Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under
the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries
between France and England in America had been in session at Paris,
waging interminable war on paper; La Galissoniere and Silhouette for
France, Shirley and Mildmay for England. By the treaty of Utrecht,
Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia? According to the
English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called
Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St.
Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the
Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.[121] The French
commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged
of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it
did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its
southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness. When the
French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those
claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a
rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self. The denial that
Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter
communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only
with the eastern portions in French hands. So new was this denial that
even La Galissoniere himself, the foremost in making it, had declared
without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire
peninsula.[122] "If," says a writer on the question, "we had to do with
a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would
be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us." He thinks
that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in
order to gain some other point by yielding this one.[123] It is curious
that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably
called the inhabitants Acadians. Innumerable public documents,
commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and
ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a
part of M