Canada has always claimed that she has been deprived of enormous areas of territory by the United States through sharp practice and unjustifiable means, especially in Oregon, Maine and Alaska. The most notable case of duplicity on the part of the United States was that of the Northeast boundary settled under the Ashburton Treaty of Washington in 1842. After a bitter controversy it was left out to arbitration for the King of the Netherlands to decide. The award was accepted by Great Britain and rejected by the United States. The question remained in abeyance for two years, during which there was imminent danger of a collision and of war. Military posts were simultaneously established and rashly advanced into the wild country which both parties claimed as their own. Redoubts and blockhouses were erected at several points. Reinforcement of troops from either side poured in. The public mind in the United States became inflamed by the too ready cry of "British outrage," proclaimed in all quarters by the reckless politicians of both parties in order to lash the national spirit into fury. The people in the whole length and breadth of the Union were, to a man, convinced of the justice of their claim and of the manifest wrong intended by Great Britain. The Nation at large was ready and anxious for war, and had a skirmish taken place on the frontier involving the death of a dozen men during the so-called "Aroostook War," the whole country would have rushed to war and plunged the two nations into hostilities, the end of which no man then living could have foreseen. During this trouble, the English people were quite calm and almost apathetic. With a vague notion of the locality of the disputed territory, a total ignorance of the merits or demerits of the dispute, and a profound contempt of the blustering and abuse of American politicians and newspapers, they were perfectly content to leave affairs in the hands of the government. Finally a joint commission was appointed from the States of Maine and Massachusetts (both having rights in the disputed territory) and sent to Washington to negotiate a treaty with Lord Ashburton, a nobleman well adapted to the occasion from his connection by marriage, and property in the United States.