departed from its usual policy of laissez faire in matters of
emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers were brought out
to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly as many
Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants
flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into
exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest
Puritan ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new
communities like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island. Other waves of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster
Presbyterians, driven out by the attempt of England to crush the
Irish woolen manufacture, and, still later, Highlanders, Roman
Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made Gaelic the prevailing
tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the colony of Nova
Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of Maine,
had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans, two
thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English,
and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this
northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the
way to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New
Englanders who had peopled it, and it was with New England that
for many a year its whole social and commercial intercourse was
carried on. It was no accident that Nova Scotia later produced
the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."

With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay
along the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Lakes, Acadia or Nova
Scotia had much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of
miles of unbroken forest wilderness lay between the two colonies,
and the sea lanes ran between the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy,
or Halifax and Havre or Plymouth, and not between Quebec and