THE NORTHWESTERN . BOUNDARY - LINE. 205 
wholly inapplicable to nations, which, if they can not 
agree and will not arbitrate, have no resource left 
save wal. 
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 America 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 
which saved the act from the imputation of wild ex- 
travagance. : 
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 
