We rather
wonder that no expiatory sacrifice on the scaffold was required
of any of these knaves. Lally Tollendal, who, as the French
leader in India, had only failed and not plundered, was sent to a
cruel execution.
Under the terms of the surrender and of the final Treaty of Peace
in 1763, civilians in Canada were given leave to return to
France. Nearly the whole of the official class and many of the
large landowners, the seigneurs, left the country. In Canada
there remained a priesthood, largely native, but soon to be
recruited from France by the upheaval of the Revolution, a few
seigneurial families, natural leaders of their race, a peasantry,
exhausted by the long war but clinging tenaciously to the soil,
and a good many hardy pioneers of the forest, men skilled in
hunting and in the use of the axe. Out of these elements,
amounting in 1763 to little more than sixty thousand people, has
come that French-Canadian race in America now numbering perhaps
three millions. The race has scattered far. It is found in the
mills of Massachusetts, in the canebrakes of Louisiana, on the
wide stretches of the prairie of the Canadian West, but it has
always kept intact its strong citadel on the banks of the St.
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