326 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
along the highlands just south of the St. Lawrence, but all maps 
and records of the time agreed in placing it there, and the 
boundary between Nova Scotia and Massachusetts was a line north to 
those highlands, as had been admitted by Chipman and others earlier. 
He maintained, in opposition to Sullivan and Madison, and to the 
British claim, that the highlands of the treaty were not meant to be 
elevated and broken ridges, but simply watersheds, and that in any 
case the reports of the surveyors in the region in question showed 
that the term highlands was applicable. In answer to the claim of 
the British agent that the highlands at the point claimed by the 
United States did not separate rivers flowing into the St. Lawrence 
from those falling into the Atlantic ocean, he replied by a lengthy 
argument to show that the treaty intended to recognize in this region 
only rivers falling into the River St. Lawrence and those falling into 
the Atlantic; there was no third class, and hence within the meaning 
of the treaty the Restigouche, falling into Bay Chaleur, was one of 
the rivers falling into the Atlantic ocean! But the point he does 
not regard as of vital importance, since it was known that the nego- 
tiators used Mitchell’s map in their deliberations, and on that map, the 
north-west angle as claimed by the United States does lie on a water- 
shed between St. Lawrence and Atlantic waters, and hence the inten- 
tion of the negotiators as to the place of the north-west angle is clear. 
In answer to Chipman’s claim that the Mars Hill highlands are those 
of the treaty, he points out that in order to make it good, Chipman 
has to reverse the description given of those highlands by the treaty 
and begin at the west and proceed east, whereas the descriptions on 
which the treaty is founded and the treaty itself proceed from the 
east westward. In answer to Chipman’s point that Congress in the 

? The argument is laboured at this point. This was always the one weak 
point in the American claim, and indeed the one flaw which made it possible 
for Great Britain to make ont a case for the discussion of the line. It was 
the more lamentable from the American point of view since it was such 
an adventitious circumstance, and totally dissociated from the true merits 
of the case. Had the Restigouche not happened to extend westward in the 
totally unexpected way it does, the words of the Treaty could have been 
literally fulfilled, and no claim on the part of Great Britain that the St. 
John did not flow into the Atlantic would have availed to secure a revision 
of the case with the resultant British advantages in this quarter. As it 
was, in order to maintain the obvious intention of the treaty, the Americans 
had to explain away the unfortunate words in this place, and to do so, 
while expressing no patience with the British claim that the St. John did 
not flow into the Atlantic, in the sense of the Treaty, had to claim that the 
Restigouche does flow into the Atlantic in the sense of the treaty, Yet one 
of these views requires no more of a strain on the imagination than the 
other. 
