400 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Britain’s position in the international controversy upon the claim of 
Quebec in the present discussion. He then attempts to show that the 
St. Lawrence watershed has no proper highlands, but that these are to 
be found (as Great Britain claimed during the international contro- 
versy) only in the Mars Hill range. This point he discusses at great 
length, and uses the old argument that if the boundary be supposed to 
commence at the western end, at Connecticut River, the range of high- 
lands runs more naturally to the Mars Hills range than through the 
northern watershed. With reference to the opinion of the commissioners 
of 1848, that neither province had any legal claim to the territory west 
of the north line and south of the St. Lawrence highlands, he says with 
great force, and, perhaps, no small sarcasm :— 
as regards the second part of the Report, 
founded on the supposed boundary of the ancient territory of Sagadahoc, 
it must be assumed that the Commissioners, in resorting to such an argu- 
ment to establish the neutrality of a portion of that territory in question, 
were unacquainted with the arguments urged by the Agents of the British 
Crown on the boundary question with the United States. The energy with 
which the British Commissioners resisted, on behalf of Great Britain, the ex- 
tension of the grant of Sagadahoc to the line the Commissioners would fain 
assign to that ancient territory renders an appeal to those limits in the pres- 
ent controversy at least anomalous, as coming from a British Commissioner, 
and it would be calculated to impugn, in the eyes of a foreign country, that 
good faith by which the British Crown is well known to have been animated 
in its resistance to the claims of the United States as their northeastern 
boundary. (Blue-book, 114). 
The concluding sentence of this citation is particularly adroit. 
He concludes that the line proposed by the commissioners is un- 
satisfactory to Quebec :— 
ist. Because the Boundaries of Canada, founded on Treaties, Proclama- 
tions, and other solemn public acts, extend southward to the boundary 
originally claimed by Great Britain as the boundary between the British 
possessions in America and the United States, which has since been restricted 
by the Treaty of Washington to the conventional line now existing under 
the authority of that Treaty. 
2nd. Because Canada has also a legal right to all the territory extending 
southwardly to the line “along the highlands ” forming the ‘axis of maxi- 
mum elevation ” from a point in the said highlands intersected by the western 
boundary line of the province of New Brunswick, eastwardly to the Baie 
des Chaleurs at Dalhousie. 
8rd. Because part of this territory anterior to the Treaty of 1763 was 
granted by the King of France, and composed the frontier settlements of 
Canada on the side of Acadia, intended, according to the spirit of the Im- 
perial Act of 1774, to be inclosed within the Province of Quebec, which exer- 
cised jurisdiction over that territory. (Blue-book, 115). 
Having thus “irrefragably established ” the legal title of Quebec 
to the territory in dispute, he admits that a conventional line of bound- 
