aine. Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French
had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early
French maps. Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its
possession by an alien.

[Footnote 121: The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as
extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of
latitude,--that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania.
Neither party cared to produce the document.]

[Footnote 122: "L'Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle
bornee par son isthme." _La Galissoniere au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749_.
The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission.]

[Footnote 123: _Memoire de l'Abbee de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753_ (1754?).]

Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called
loudly for solution. What line should separate Canada and her western
dependencies from the British colonies? Various principles of
demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French
side was a geographical one. All countries watered by streams falling
into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to
belong to her. This would have planted her in the heart of New York and
along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the
continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast. Yet
in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her
explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of
her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this
wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their
farms, or their fisheries,--in view of all this, her pretensions were
moderate and reasonable compared with those of England. The treaty of
Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British
subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them
belonged to the British Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? The
Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military
expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in the case
of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in
the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who
returned after the invaders were gone. But the range of their
war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every
mountain, forest, or prairie wher