Previous to the Treaty of Independence only one Act was passed bearing upon the southern boundary of Canada. The Quebec Act of 1774 draws its boundaries between the province of Quebec and the colonies of Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, in words nearly the same as those of the Proclamation of 1763. When the State of Massachusetts and the State of Maine were acknowledged to be “free, sovereign, and independent,” by the Treaty of 1783, the contracting parties appeared to have defined the boundary-line with tolerable exactitude. They wished to prevent disputes between the United States and the colonies, and therefore the boundaries were constituted “from the north-west angle of Nova Scotia,--viz., that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of the St. Croix river to the highlands, along the said highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean,--to the north-westernmost head of Connecticut river east, by a line to be drawn along the middle of the river St. Croix from its mouth in the Bay of Fundy to its source, and from its source directly north to the aforesaid highlands which divide the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from those which fall into the river St. Lawrence, comprehending all highlands within twenty leagues of any harbour of the United States, and lying between lines to be drawn due east from the points where the aforesaid boundaries between Nova Scotia on the one part, and East Florida on the other, shall respectively touch the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean, except such highlands as now are, or heretofore have been, within the limits of the said province of Nova Scotia.”