s upon the same point, by her possessions of this
country for almost a century, and by her description of Acadia, during
the negotiation of that very treaty upon which this doubt is raised,
she cannot but admit the claim of Great Britain to be conformable to the
treaty of Utrecht, and to the description of the country transferred
to Great Britain by the twelfth article of that treaty. There is a
consistency in the claim of the English, and a completeness in the
evidence brought in support of it, which is seldom seen in discussions
of this sort; for it rarely happens, in disputes of such a nature
between two crowns, that either of them can safely offer to have its
pretensions decided by the known and repeated declarations, or the
possessions of the other. To answer the force of this detail of
conclusive historical facts, and to give a new turn to the real question
in dispute, the French commissaries, in their memorial, laid it down as
a distinction made by the treaty of Utrecht, that the ancient limits of
Acadia, referred to by that treaty, are different from any with which
that country may have passed under the treaties of St. Germain's and
Breda; and then endeavoured to show, upon the testimonies of maps and
historians, that Acadia and its limits were anciently confined to the
south-eastern part of the peninsula. In support of this system, the
French commissaries had recourse to ancient maps and historians, who,
as they asserted, had ever confined Acadia to the limits they assigned.
They alleged, that those commissions of the French government over
Acadia, which the English cited as evidence of the limits they claimed,
were given as commissions over Acadia and the country around it, and not
over Acadia only; that the whole of the country claimed by the English
as Acadia, could not possibly be supposed ever to be considered as such,
because many parts of that territory always did, and still do, preserve
particular and distinct names. They affirmed New France to be a province
in itself; and argued that many parts of what we claim as Acadia can
never have been in Acadia, because historians and the French commissions
of government expressly place them in New France. They asserted, that no
evidence can be drawn of the opinion of any crown, with respect to the
limits of any country, from its declaration during the negotiation of
a treaty: and, in the ends relying upon maps and historians for the
ancient limits of Acadia, they