The French and the Micmacs 213

to win and maintain the alliance with the Micmacs by all the arts of diplomacy that could be employed “in the interests of the state and of religion.” In this respect they outwitted the English who found to their cost that even when they imitated the more humane policy of the French it was misrepresented to the Indians as an attempt to get them into their toils with a view to their ultimate destruction.

As early as 1720 Soubras, Commissaire of Ile Royale, expressed his desire to get the Indians to settle in villages so as to be readily accessible to French influence, but he did not wish to have them too near the garrison because of the demoralizing effect of drink upon the Indians and of sexual license upon the soldiers.* This plan was persisted in, and as late as 1751 Abbé de l’Isle Dieu, Vicar-General for the French colonies, wrote that the interests of the state and of religion required that the Indians be formed in villages that they might be attached to the state by religion and then utilized according to circumstances. From the first the French mission- aries had labored with courage and endurance to convert the Indians and to inculcate reverence for their earthly father, the French King and the first son of the church. Their language had been reduced to symbolic writing by Le Clercq and by continual pressure upon them some sort of ordered life had been achieved; so that in 1720 St. Ovide, Governor of Ile Royale, could report that he had distributed

1C11 B, Vol, 12, p. 588. 2C11 A, Vol. 98, p. 20.