Page:The history of Grand-Pre by Herbin, John Frederic.djvu/16

8 larger chapter of a people's history, has made hallowed ground of Grand-Pré. Yet, apart from the beauty of the poem, and the romantic glamour it throws over the land of Evangeline, the pages of Acadian story make unique and strange facts of history. Many of its chapters are both thrilling and picturesque, and not a few will be found deeply pathetic. The struggle for supremacy between the greatest of the Latin and the Teutonic races, whose national rivalry and antipathy so often made Europe a battlefield, also caused England and France to continue their strife and perpetuate their hatred in the forests of the New World. This forms the background of the picture. Against this we may trace the growth of Acadia from its first settlement in 1605 through one hundred and fifty years to the deportation in 1755, when occurred the closing scene at Grand-Pré, when the Acadians were taken from their homes, their lands left desolate, and their habitations and buildings burned to make it impossible for them to return. The mighty tides of Fundy completed the work of man's destruction by breaking down the neglected dykes and letting in the waters to flow over the fields where their last labors had been to harvest their grain and to store the fruitage of their whole summer's toil.

The poem "Evangeline" is a remarkably correct page of history. Since its appearance in 1847, because the odium of the act of the expulsion seemed to rest with the English Government, a great deal has been written in attempt to show that the Acadians were, in themselves, largely to blame for the fate that