came, and from the other side of which the water-shed was towards the Atlantic Ocean. Tons of pamphlets, years of controversy, and thousands of pounds might have been spared, not to speak of much national animosity. It may be remarked here, that the difficulty of reconciling States’ rights with Imperial Federal policy was fore-shadowed in the original disputes which took place at the time of the treaty adjustment. The Treaty speaks of the “boundaries between the possessions of Her Britannic Majesty in North America and the territories of the United States;” but the State of Maine in its vehement protest against the line of the King of the Netherlands, assumed the language and the port of an independent Power. Mr. Thomas Colley Grattan, in his work, “Civilised America,” has collected an immense amount of information, and has drawn up an argument on the subject, which prove beyond a doubt, even without collateral aid, that the line yielded by Lord Ashburton was not that which was meant by the framers of the Treaty of 1783. Let us consider how the case stood. In 1763 the French possessions in North America were ceded to Great Britain, and in the October of that year a royal proclamation defined the boundaries of the government of Quebec, “bounded on the Labrador coast by the river St. John, which falls into the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and from there by a line drawn from the head of that river through the Lake of St. John to the south end of the Lake Nipissing, from whence the said line, crossing the river St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain in 45 degrees of north latitude, passes along the highlands which divide the rivers that empty themselves into the said river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea, and also along the north coast of the Bay of Chaleurs and the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Rosière, and from thence crossing the mouth of the river St. Lawrence by the west end of the island of Anticosti, terminates in the aforesaid Lake of St. John.” It is fortunate enough that we have no neighbours to raise any question about “the line drawn through the Lake of St. John to the south end of the Lake Nipissing.”