788 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM

A.D. 1689
—1776.

Pains had been taken to render the tax on tea a charge
that was little more than nominal, and that would hardly
affect the consumers’. The destruction of the chests was
the act of a community, conscious of its own vitality, and
Jetermined to protest against the control of any outside
authority, whether king or parliament. The first blow was
not instigated by economic motives, and the lines of cleavage
in the colonial possessions had no perceptible connection
with the areas which were exposed to the pressure of
grievances under the British System. The sugar and the
tobacco plantations, which had received very similar care,
took opposite sides; so, too, did Canada and New England,
which had developed under very similar economic conditions.
[t was unintelligible to the English colonists that the French
settlers should not be ready to take the opportunity of
throwing off a yoke that had been so recently imposed;
but the Canadians were deeply embittered against their
neighbours in America, and had no special grudge against
King George III. Little cause as the Canadians had to
love the British Crown, they had far more grounds for
resentment against the patrons of the Five Nations, and
would not make common cause with their English-speaking
neighbours. The responsibility for the desolation of Acadia?
was held to lie, not so much with the English Government,
as with the contractors and sailors who had carried off the
habitans, and scattered them in the English plantations.
Physical contiguity and social antipathy defined the lines along
which the colonial system split up, and economic grievances
were hardly perceptible in connection with the actual breach.
pois 239. Economic and fiscal objects had determined the
vere led course taken by British statesmen themselves?, but their belief

the line of
cleavage
om which
severance
sccurred.

1 Fiske, War of Independence, p. 80.
? The judgment of Burke and the picture drawn by Longfellow seem to me to
ye substantially correct. Parkman has attempted to justify the deportation of
:he Acadians (Montcalm and Wolf, 1901, 1. 284), but he was not acquainted with
some of the most important documentary evidence which has been more recently
printed by Casgrain. The British Governors prevented the Acadians from
sxercising the right of emigration to French territory which had been secured to
them by the treaty of Utrecht; the Acadians were forced to remain unwillingly
on British soil, and then punished because of their divided loyalty. Casgrain,
Tn pélerinage aw Pays d' Evangéline, p. 112. 8 See above, p. 424.