o equitable principles and with a view to
the respective interests and the convenience of the two parties. He
stated that His Majesty's Government were perfectly ready to treat for
such a line, and conceived that the natural features of the disputed
territory would afford peculiar facilities for drawing it; that His
Majesty's Government would therefore propose an equal division of the
territory in dispute between Great Britain and the United States, and
that the general outline of such a division would be that the boundary
between the two States should be drawn due north from the head of St.
Croix River till it intersected the St. John; thence up the bed of the
St. John to the southernmost source of that river, and from that point
it should be drawn to the head of the Connecticut River in such manner
as to make the northern and southern allotments of the divided territory
as nearly as possible equal to each other in extent.

In reply to the preceding note the Secretary, under date of February 29,
1836, expressed the President's regret to find that His Britannic
Majesty's Government adhered to its objection to the appointment of a
commission to be chosen in either of the modes heretofore proposed by
the United States and his conviction that the proposition on which it
was founded, "that the river question was a treaty construction only,"
although repeated on various occasions by Great Britain, was
demonstrably untenable, and, indeed, only plausible when material and
most important words of description in the treaty are omitted in quoting
from that instrument. He said that while His Majesty's Government
maintain their position agreement between the United States and Great
Britain on this point was impossible; that the President was therefore
constrained to look to the new and conventional line offered in Mr.
Bankhead's note, but that in such a line the wishes and interests of
Maine were to be consulted, and that the President could not in justice
to himself or that State make any proposition utterly irreconcilable
with her previously well-known opinions on the subject; that the
principle of compromise and equitable division was adopted by the King
of the Netherlands in the line recommended by him, a line rejected by
the United States because unjust to Maine; and yet that line gave to
Great Britain little more than 2,000,000, while the proposition now made
by His Majesty's Government secured to Great Britain of the disputed