This latter view is probably nearer the truth. There is always, especially in England, a tendency to sympathize unreasonably with the weak against the strong, and, when severe measures are taken, to condemn those measures almost unheard. The Acadians, in their primitive agricultural life, in their farms gathered round the village church, were picturesque objects of sympathy; and, whenever a fine or a punishment is inflicted on a whole district or on a whole community, the innocent no doubt suffer with the guilty. But there are conditions under which no lasting effect can be produced without collective dealing, and the Acadians were not transported beyond the sea until for many years half-measures had been tried, and tried in vain. These farmers had been gently treated under English rule; many of them had been born and brought up under it; a large proportion of their number had requited the treatment by actively abetting or tacitly conniving at the unceasing petty warfare, by which French borderers and Indian savages year after year took English lives and pillaged English homes. Was it unreasonable that, if they would not be loyal subjects in Acadia, they should be moved elsewhere, and that, instead of being sent to increase the hostile population of Canada, they should be dispersed among the British colonies on the North American coast? It must be remembered that the tale of their sufferings has probably not been minimized. French writers would naturally exaggerate what actually occurred, and American accounts, until recent years, would not be likely to be unduly friendly to England. It must be remembered, too, that half as many as were transported by the English had already been induced or forced by the French to emigrate to their possessions; and we have it on French evidence that those who, {228} when the sentence of expatriation was passed, took refuge in Canada, suffered as much as or more than their compatriots suffered in the English colonies. [Sidenote: _True causes of the catastrophe._]