armed or unarmed, to protect the timber recently cut and to
prevent further depredations.

In the complaints of infractions of the agreements by the State of Maine
addressed to the undersigned Mr. Fox has assumed two positions which are
not authorized by the terms of those agreements: First. Admitting the
right of Maine to maintain a civil posse in the disputed territory for
the purposes stated in the agreement, he does so with the restriction
that the action of the posse was to be confined within certain limits;
and, second, by making the advance of the Maine posse into the valley of
the Upper St. John the ground of his complaint of encroachment upon the
Madawaska settlement, he assumes to extend the limits of that settlement
beyond those it occupied at the date of the agreement.

The United States can not acquiesce in either of these positions.

In the first place, nothing is found in the agreement subscribed to
by Governor Fairfield and Sir John Harvey defining any limits in the
disputed territory within which the operations of the civil posse of
Maine were to be circumscribed. The task of preserving the timber
recently cut and of preventing further depredations _within the disputed
territory_ was assigned to the State of Maine after her military force
should have been withdrawn from it, and it was to be accomplished by a
civil posse, armed or unarmed, which was to continue in the territory
and to operate in every part of it where its agency might be required
to protect the timber already cut and prevent further depredations,
without any limitation whatever or any restrictions except such as
might be construed into an attempt to disturb by arms the Province
of New Brunswick in her possession of the Madawaska settlement or
interrupt the usual communication between the Provinces.

It is thus, in the exercise of a legitimate right and in the
conscientious discharge of an obligation imposed upon her by a
solemn compact, that the State of Maine has done those acts which have
given rise to complaints for which no adequate cause is perceived.
The undersigned feels confident that when those acts shall have been
considered by Her Majesty's Government at home as explained in his note
to Mr. Fox of the 24th of December last and in connection with the
foregoing remarks they will no longer be viewed as calculated to excite
the apprehensions of Her Majesty's Government that the faith of existing
arrangements is to be broken on