96 THEISLAND ACADIANS

kinds of activities'”®. It was also mentioned that the Acadians did not try to climb the social ladder, preferring to remain ordinary farmers"'. This was perfectly compatible with their lifestyle as characterized by a strong feeling of communal solidarity that honoured mutual help rather than personal gain.

For a long time Acadian communities remained relatively isolated and self-sufficient, apparently seeking a certain independence as indi- cated in a petition signed by the inhabitants of Rustico in 1792. They asked the governor of the Island for permission not to contribute to the public assistance program because they were taking care of their own poor people.

It is not surprising that the Acadians preferred to handle their own affairs and avoid the colonial administration since memories of the expulsion and the way they had been mistreated by the English remained vivid for several generations. The absentee landlord system, as we have seen, did not help to reassure them that the period of the Great Upheaval had come to an end. The Acadians did not, however, show any hostility either toward the British administrators or their neighbours from a different culture. They adapted to the system while at the same time keeping their distance. When Governor Edmund Fanning left the Island in 1804 he praised the Acadians for their “orderly, peaceable and meritorious” behaviour, for their “con- stant obedience to government” and their “unshaken loyalty to the King”'. Despite everything, feelings of independence and suspicion were still strong amongst the Acadians on the Island at the end of the 1860s. This is clearly indicated in a letter by an Acadian published in The Summerside Progress:

Although British subjects, the Acadians in this Island are in reality a separate people, holding themselves aloof in most of the social affairs of life from their fellow-colonists who speak a different language from their own, and who are too often apt to look upon them as an ignorant and antiquated class of people. The Acadians, on the other hand, while they look upon their more conceited fellow-colonists as their superiors in learning and wealth, are repelled from proper sympathy with them by the remembrance of the sufferings their fathers endured at the time of the conquest of these Provinces by the English, and subsequently.'”

Until 1830, Catholics on the Island could neither vote nor sit in the Legislature. From then on, Acadians ventured timidly into the