mission might be constituted:
First, that it should consist of commissioners to be chosen in equal
numbers by the two parties, with an umpire selected by some friendly
sovereign from among the most skillful men in Europe; or, secondly, that
it should be entirely composed of such men so selected, to be attended
in the survey and view of the country by agents appointed by the
parties. This commission, it was afterwards proposed, should be
restricted to the simple question of determining the point designated
by the treaty as the highlands which divide the waters that fall into
the Atlantic from those which flow into the St. Lawrence; that these
highlands should be sought for in a north or northwest direction from
the source of the St. Croix, and that a straight line to be drawn from
the monument at the head of that river to those highlands should be
considered, so far as it extends, as a part of the boundary in question.
The commissioners were then to designate the course of the line along
the highlands and to fix on the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut
River.

In a note of 31st May the British minister suggested that this perplexed
and hitherto interminable question could only be set at rest by an
abandonment of the defective description of boundary contained in the
treaty, by the two Governments mutually agreeing upon a conventional
line more convenient to both parties than those insisted upon by the
commissioners under the fifth article of the treaty of Ghent, or that
suggested by the King of the Netherlands.

Mr. McLane remarked in reply (June 5) that the embarrassments in tracing
the treaty boundary had arisen more from the principles assumed and
from the manner of seeking for it than from any real defect in the
description when properly understood; that in the present state of the
business the suggestion of Sir Charles R. Vaughan would add to the
existing difficulties growing out of a want of power in the General
Government under the Constitution of the United States to dispose of
territory belonging to either of the States of the Union without the
consent of the State; that as a conventional line to the south of and
confessedly variant from that of the treaty would deprive the State of
Maine of a portion of the territory she claims, it was not probable
that her consent to it would be given while there remained a reasonable
prospect of discovering the line of the treaty of 1783, and that the
President would