[GANONG] BOUNDARIES OF NEW BRUNSWICK 323 
lands ” in the treaty. The words of the treaty, therefore, he argues, do 
not describe any locality north of the St. John, either in respect to the 
dividing of River St. Lawrence from Atlantic Ocean rivers, or in 
respect to the presence of “ Highlands” there. It being impossible to 
interpret the treaty literally by its words, recourse must be had to its 
intention, and of this he, and others after him, made much. 
The preamble to the treaty declares that the parties mutually wish 
“to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse between the 
two countries, upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual 
convenience, as may promote and secure to both perpetual peace and 
harmony.” With this expression of the negotiators’ intention to “ pro- 
mote mutual convenience,” can we accept, says Chipman, 
‘Such an interpretation of the Treaty, as is now contended for by the 
Agent of the United States; an interpretation which the American Com- 
missioners at Paris would have rejected with disdain, and to which Great 
Britain would never have submitted. It cannot indeed be supposed to have 
been intended when that Treaty was formed, either on the part of the United 
States to claim, or on the part of His Majesty to yield, a boundary which 
would sever from his Territories the Source, and a very large portion of the 
River St. John, which River as we have seen was expressly relinquished 
as a line of Boundary by the American Negotiators themselves, and which 
River empties itself within His Majesty’s Territories, into the Bay of 
Fundy, sixty miles eastward of the River St. Croix, which last mentioned 
River was with so much deliberation adopted as the eastern boundary of 
the United States in that quarter, a boundary which would also sever from 
his Territories the Sources and large portions of the River Restigouche, and 
several large streams tributary to the Restigouche. 
(Boundary MS.) 
And in another place he uses the same argument of mutual con- 
venience against a line cutting off the communication between the 
provinces. He maintains that the obvious intention of the treaty was 
to assign to each nation the sources of the rivers emptying through its 
own territories, and he finds many arguments for the contention that 
the entire St. John was intended to fall from source to mouth in 
British territory. One of his reasons for this is that in the preliminary 
negotiations the Americans claimed the St. John as a boundary, but 
this was refused by the British negotiators, and the boundary was con- 
tracted to the St. Croix. After this refusal, says Chipman, is it to be 
supposed that they would immediately grant a line of boundary cut- 
ting across that river and giving most of it to the United States ? This 
argument of Chipman’s received a most welcome support when the 
secret journals of Congress were published in Boston in 1821, of which 
he took immediate advantage in a supplement to his arguments. Those 
journals show that as early as 1779 instructions were given by Con- 
