Leadership Quote by Charles Lawrence

“After mature consideration” is the kind of phrase that pretends to be a pause for ethics when it’s really a drumroll for logistics. Charles Lawrence, as a colonial administrator, writes in the voice of orderly governance: unanimous agreement, sufficient number, all possible expedition. Every clause leans on bureaucratic calm. That calm is the weapon. It turns an act of coercion into a procedural necessity, like balancing a ledger.

The stated intent is “prevention”: stop people from returning to “molest” settlers placed on “their lands.” The possessive slip matters. “Their lands” nominally refers to the displaced, but the sentence instantly pivots to the settlers who “may be set down” there, as if settlement is just an administrative placement, not a seizure. “Molest” does heavy moral laundering, recasting resistance or return as criminal harassment rather than a claim to home. Lawrence isn’t merely planning removal; he’s scripting the future narrative in which the removed are framed as threats.

Context sharpens the stakes. Lawrence was central to the mid-18th-century deportation of the Acadians from Nova Scotia, a state-run uprooting designed to neutralize a population seen as strategically unreliable and to clear land for Anglo-Protestant settlement. The line’s most chilling move is how it pairs speed (“all possible expedition”) with managerial restraint (“mature consideration”). It’s the colonial mindset in miniature: violence described as risk management, displacement justified as public safety, ships hired not to transport people but to transport the problem out of sight.