THE NORTHWESTERN BOUNDARY - LINE. 205 



wholly inapplicable to nations, whicb, if tliey can not 

 agree and will not arbitrate, have no resource left 

 save war. 



But this was not the only consideration which in- 

 duced the Senate to refuse its assent to that treaty. 

 There were objections to the form of submission. 



HISTORY OF THE QUESTION. 



The controversy to which these treaties refer is one 

 of the leavings of the last war between the United 

 States and Great Britain, and has its roots far back in 

 the circumstances of the primitive colonization of 

 North Amei'ica by Europeans. 



When the Kings of the little island of Britain, in 

 virtue of some of their subjects having coasted along 

 a part of the Atlantic shores of America, assumed to 

 concede to the Colonies of Massachusetts and Virginia 

 grants of territory extending by parallels of latitude 

 westward to the Pacific Ocean, and covering the un- 

 explored immensity of the Continent, and on the prem- 

 ises of sovereignty and jurisdiction as good as their 

 title to the manor of East Greenwich in Kent, — it 

 was only men's universal ignorance of geography 

 w^hich saved the act from the imputation of wild ex- 

 trava2;ance. 



But such grants, and the pretensions on which they 

 were founded, were the logical consequence of the 

 theories of colonization and conquest pursued in the 

 New World by Spain, Portugal, and France, as well 

 as England, and formed the basis of the power of 

 Great Britain in North America, and eventually of 



