of the disputed property, is a truth the president freely admits; but the undersigned is instructed to remind Mr. Bankhead of what has been heretofore stated, that in a conventional line the wishes and interests of the state of Maine were to be consulted, and that the president cannot, in justice to himself or to that state, make any proposition utterly irreconcilable with her previously well-known opinions on the subject. His majesty's government will not have forgotten that the principle of compromise and equitable division was adopted by the king of the Netherlands in the line recommended by him to the parties; a line rejected by the United States, because unjust to Maine; and yet the line proposed by the king of the Netherlands gave to Great Britain little more than two millions, while the proposition now made by his Britannic majesty's government secures to Great Britain of the disputed land more than four millions of acres. The division offered by Mr. Bankhead's note is not in harmony with the equitable rule from which it is said to spring, and if it were in conformity with it, could not be accepted without disrespect to the previous decisions and just expectations of Maine. The president is far from supposing this proposition is founded upon a desire of his majesty's government to acquire territory, or that the quantity of land secured to Great Britain in the proposed compromise was the leading motive to the offer made. His majesty's government has no doubt made the offer without regard to the extent of the territory falling to the north or south of the St. John's, from a belief that a change in the character of the boundary line, substituting a river for a highland boundary, would be useful in preventing territorial disputes in future. Coinciding in this view of the subject, the president is nevertheless compelled to decline the boundary proposed, as inconsistent with the known wishes, rights, and decisions of the state.

"With a view, however, to terminate at once all controversy; and satisfactorily, without regard to the extent of territory lost by one party or acquired by the other, to establish an unchangeable and definite and indisputable boundary, the president will, if his majesty's government consents to it, apply to the state of Maine for its assent to make the river St. John's, from its source to its mouth, the boundary between Maine and his Britannic majesty's dominions in that part of North America."

This modification of the natural equity principle, although applying to a very strongly marked natural feature of the country, was of course at once rejected as inadmissible. It would trench upon his majesty's territory of New Brunswick. The British government had even refused to treat concerning the navigation of the St. John, as an integral portion of the question. The convenience to be consulted in any political arrangement for partition according to the natural principles of equity and natural features of the country, related mainly to that of his Britannic majesty's dominions, and was to be resolved rather upon the ideas of his majesty's ministers. Now we have the most entire respect for the principle of this objection. It is founded on rights secured and guarantied by treaty. We have no right to go to the St. John below the meridian in any event. We acknowledge it would trench upon territory to which we have no pretension; although we may insist that there are certain ancient landmarks to which, in case the treaty delimitation

should be dissolved, the United States might well claim to be restored. Meantime it may be mentioned, that, in notifying to Mr. Forsyth that the proposition offered by him, to render the boundary a river one, by the St. John throughout, was one to which he was sure the British government would never agree, he intimated that perhaps Mr. Forsyth had not given to the modification which had just before been proposed by the British government to the plan suggested by the president the full weight to which it was entitled. To this Mr. Forsyth simply replied, that before consenting to such a modification, it would be necessary for the president to be more fully informed of the views of the British government in offering it. This the more as the president was to bear in mind, as it had been carefully inculcated upon him, that the office of the commission proposed by him was only regarded as an experimental one, not to be authorized to decide on points of difference, but merely to report the result of their labours to their respective governments, so as to pave the way for an ultimate settlement of the question. It may be observed, that all this latter part of the negotiation with Mr. Bankhead, to wit, touching the mode of looking for highlands, upon the description of which both parties were agreed-with the alternative offer of an equitable division of the disputed territory-and the overture to which it led from Mr. Forsyth of a line along the whole St. John-transpired after the communication of the president at the commencement of the session, that Great Britain declined to renew the negotiation, except upon certain preliminary conditions, which he judged to be incompatible with a satisfactory and rightful adjustment of the controversy. The new method which Mr. Bankhead was instructed to propose had apparently been transmitted by the British government before they could be apprised of the president's resolution to break the matter to congress, and invite thus their attention to the state of the negotiation. And upon whatever state of information the call which was made for the correspondence arose, we may suppose that the character of this additional portion of it-which certainly did not improve the complexion of that which preceded, nor render the whole of it any more palatable-created some motive to induce the president to comply with a request which he had considered it inexpedient to grant upon a former occasion; and we may also presume that it formed a further reason, in the . judgment of the senate, to which it was submitted as having been originally undertaken under their advice, to publish the whole negotiation. It is probable that this reference of the subject was not precisely anticipated by the British government; and that it was a conjuncture not provided for in the instructions of Mr. Bankhead.

We know nothing really more admirable than the tone which the British government has maintained upon this claim-advanced, as it has been, in the face of its own most conspicuous public acts, already of considerable antiquity as well as of the highest solemnity, and in the face, also, of its own contemporaneous and continued exposition of the terms contained in those authentic documents, proclaimed in the most distinct and unequivocal manner, down to the determination of the river St. Croix, upon which that of the northwest angle of Nova Scotia then depended. If there is any one characteristic more distinctly impressed upon it than another, from first to last, it is that of boldness. This is the first, the second, and the third broad attribute stamped upon it. As the case now stands, it rests, on their part, not on the ground of the treaty, for that has been abandoned, but on the ground that the treaty itself is, in this respect, a dead letter, and that the space which is covered by the claim was a sort of dominium jacens, belonging to nobody, or at all events, to nobody but themselves. It is no longer pretended to be founded upon an intermediate range of highlands dividing the waters of the Penobscot from those of the St. John-as though that could ever have served the terms of the treaty. Nothing more is said about Mars Hill; and all the argument that was offered before the arbiter upon that claim now rests upon the merely negative effect of his award, and the possession, to a certain point, of the river St. John. "A strong point on those claims," said Sir Charles R. Vaughan, with some emphasis, "is the exclusive possession of the river St. John's." The sum, it seems, of all that was submitted to the king of the Netherlands is, that he did not find sufficient premises in the case, in the way in which it was prepared for him, to come to a decision of the point that was proposed to him; and, therefore, they say, that if they have no case of it, neither have we; that it is as if there had never been any treaty about it, and nothing remains but to divide the land between us upon certain fair principles, or to put a kind of gloss or sham construction upon the treaty, with a view to avoid what might otherwise be in the nature of a constitutional difficulty.

It is rather a curious fact in the history of the negotiation of 1783, that it was proposed, in the first place, to leave the settlement of the northeastern boundary to subsequent arrangement; but the boundary defined in the treaty was afterwards concluded to be adopted, in order, as it was expressed, to prevent disputes, and lay a firm foundation for future peace between the two countries. And it is certainly singular that such a sort of remote, posthumous result, as was thereby intended to be avoided, should, after all, have been raised out of the very terms by which it was to have been prevented. It is very

remarkable, too, that such a strange mischance should have occurred at the very point at which the boundary of the United States was to begin. But, supposing the treaty line to be canceled on the Canadian side, in consequence of such gross defects of description, that according to the doctrine of the king of the Netherlands, as quoted and carried out by the organs of the British government, no such delimitation exists in that quarter, as was deemed to be described by the treaty, does it follow that Maine is, in fact, without any boundary upon the north, or that the United States are entitled to none but such as the British government may allow ?

By the first article of the original treaty of peace, his Britannic majesty acknowledges the United States, naming New Hampshire, Massachusetts, &c., to be free, sovereign, and independent states; and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquished all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof. These territorial rights, &c. were determined by their original grants and charters, as they had been expounded and defined prior to the rise of those events and questions that led to the revolution. The authority of the Quebec act was never acknowledged by the colonies. The application of the proclamation of 1763 was not opposed, but it never was adopted any further than its terms were reduced to precision by the description of the treaty of 1783; and if that description signifies nothing now, no more does the antetype from which it was taken. The grant of Nova Scotia to Sir William Alexander went to the river St. Lawrence; and that was insisted upon by the government of Great Britain up to the capture of Quebec. The adjoining territory of Sagadahock, originally mentioned to have been granted to the duke of York, and annexed to the crown, by which it was afterwards united with Maine to the province of Massachusetts, was bounded on Nova Scotia, and extended likewise to the St. Lawrence. The due north line is still declared by the British government to be the western limit of Nova Scotia; and the ancient northwest angle of that province existed, until the autumn, at least, of 1763, (as it was pronounced by the king of the Netherlands,) upon the bank of the St. Lawrence. Thither, also, was carried and conjoined the northeast conterminous point or angle of what John Randolph used to call, with his characteristic precision, the old province of Maine and Sagadahock. There never was any question respecting the rightfulness of this claim under the Massachusetts charter, except so far as arose from the operation of the treaties of Ryswick and Breda, by which the debatable tract was ceded to France; but there was a regular confirmation of the grant to the duke of York subsequent to the treaty of Breda, and by the treaty of Utrecht the whole territory was

retroceded to Great Britain, under the description of Nova Scotia, or Acadia, with its ancient boundaries; and all that lay west of Nova Scotia was resumed as part of the Massachusetts province. It was distinctly holden by the opinions of the attorney and solicitor generals of England, (afterwards Lords Chancellors Talbot and Hardwicke,) in 1731, that, upon the conquest of the territory between Kennebeck (Sagadahock) and St. Croix, the law of nations occasioned only a temporary suspension, and did not create an extinguishment of previous proprietorship;-that, upon the reconquest of that territory, all the ancient rights of the province and of subjects of the crown were revived and restored by the jus postliminii; and that, consequently, although there were restrictions upon grants of land by the province under the charter, yet the crown acquired no new powers of settlement or government over it. It cannot be necessary to remark, that it was not in the power of the king, by his mere act, without process of law, to curtail the chartered limits of the provinces; and even the Quebec act of 1774, which was built on the proclamation of 1763, contained a clause that nothing in it should affect, in any way, the boundaries of any other colony. There was some little talk, after the proclamation, between the agent of Massachusetts and the British ministry, relative to ceding to the crown "the narrow tract of land belonging to Massachusetts, bordering on the St. Lawrence, which was wanted by the crown to complete the continuity of the province of Quebec." We know it was urged by Lord Hillsborough upon the province of Massachusetts, in 1764, to authorize a cession to the crown of all claim, under their charter, to the lands on the river St. Lawrence, destined, by the royal proclamation of the year before, to form part of the government of Quebec. But nothing was done, of a definite nature, on the part of Massachusetts, before the treaty of 1783. There could have been no ground of doubt, indeed, whatever, that the king could neither revoke nor restrict the rights of territory and government which had once been granted by the crown, except on the absolute assertion of the sovereign right of conquest. But in those achievements, which added Nova Scotia and afterwards Canada to the British crown, and in defence of that common inheritance of her soil which surrounds her shores, the fisheries, New England had expended more of blood and treasure, according to the declaration of the illustrious John Adams, than all the rest of the British empire. The history of Massachusetts, alone, by Hutchinson, shows how much she exhausted her efforts and means for this purpose, and to what straits she was sometimes reduced for relief. The only doctrine recognized among American statesmen has been that the treaty of 1783 was a division of the empire; that it was nothing more than a mutual ac