the monument; and certainly it could not be
more difficult for commissioners on the spot to arrive at a conclusion
satisfactory to their own judgment as to the locality of the highlands.

Mr. McLane, in answer to Sir Charles's request for information on the
subject, stated that the difficulty in the way of the adoption of
the line recommended by the arbiter was the want of authority in the
Government of the United States to agree to a line not only confessedly
different from the line called for by the treaty, but which would
deprive the State of Maine of a portion of territory to which she would
be entitled according to the line of the definitive treaty; that by the
President's proposition a commission would be raised, not to establish
a new line differing from the treaty of 1783, but to determine what
the true and original boundary was and in which of the two disagreeing
parties the right to the disputed territory originally was; that for
this purpose the authority of the original commissioners, if they could
have agreed, was complete under the Ghent treaty, and that of the new
commission proposed to be constituted could not be less.

Sir Charles R. Vaughan explained, under date of the 24th of March, with
regard to his observation "that the mode in which it was proposed by the
United States to settle the boundary was complicated; that he did not
mean to apply it to the adoption of a rule in the settlement of disputed
questions of location, but to the manner in which it is proposed by the
United States that the new commission of survey shall be selected and
constituted."

On the 8th of December, 1834, Sir Charles R. Vaughan transmitted a note
to the Department of State, in which, after a passing expression of the
regret of His Majesty's Government that the American Government still
declined to come to a separate understanding on the several points of
difference with respect to which the elements of decision were fully
before both Governments, but without abandoning the argument contained
in his note of 10th February last, he addressed himself exclusively to
the American proposition for the appointment of a new commission to be
empowered to seek westward of the meridian of the St. Croix highlands
answering to the description of those mentioned in the treaty of 1783.
He stated with regard to the rule of surveying on which the proposition
was founded that however just and reasonable it might be, His Majesty's
Government