can not consent to be governed in the
prosecution of the existing negotiation by the opinion of the arbiter
upon any of the preliminary points about which there was a previous
difference between the parties, and the adverse decision of which
has led to so unsatisfactory and, in the view of this Government, so
erroneous a conclusion. This determination on the part of the United
States not to adopt the premises of the arbiter while rejecting his
conclusion has been heretofore made known to Her Majesty's Government,
and while it remains must necessarily render the discussion of the
question what those premises were unavailing, if not irrelevant. The few
observations which the undersigned was led to make in the course of his
note to Sir Charles Vaughan upon one of the points alleged to have been
thus determined were prompted only by a respect for the arbiter and a
consequent anxiety to remove a misinterpretation of his meaning, which
alone, it was believed, could induce the supposition that the arbiter,
in searching for the rivers referred to in the treaty as designating the
boundary, could have come to the opinion that the two great rivers whose
waters pervaded the whole district in which the search was made and
constituted the most striking objects of the country had been entirely
unnoticed by the negotiators of the treaty and were to be passed over
unheeded in determining the line, while others were to be sought for
which he himself asserts could not be found. That the imputation of
such an opinion to the respected arbiter could only be the result
of misinterpretation seemed the more evident, as he had himself
declared that "it could not be sufficiently explained how, if the
high contracting parties intended in 1783 to establish the boundary
at the south of the river St. John, that river, to which the territory
in dispute was in a great measure indebted for its distinctive
character, had been neutralized and set aside." It is under the
influence of the same motives that the undersigned now proceeds to
make a brief comment upon the observations contained in Mr. Fox's note
of the 10th ultimo, and thus to close a discussion which it can answer
no purpose to prolong.

The passage from the award of the arbiter quoted by the undersigned
in his note of the 28th April, 1835, to Sir Charles Vaughan, and the
true meaning of which Mr. Fox supposes to have been misconceived, is
the following: "If in contradistinction to the rivers