Always aiming at an amicable adjustment of the dispute, both parties have entertained and repeatedly urged upon each other a desire that each should exercise its rights, whatever it considered them to be, in such a manner as to avoid collision and allay to the greatest practicable extent the excitement likely to grow out of the controversy.  It was in pursuance of such an understanding that Maine and Massachusetts, upon the remonstrance of Great Britain, desisted from making sales of lands, and the General Government from the construction of a projected military road in a portion of the territory of which they claimed to have enjoyed the exclusive possession; and that Great Britain on her part, in deference to a similar remonstrance from the United States, suspended the issue of licenses to cut timber in the territory in controversy and also the survey and location of a railroad through a section of country over which she also claimed to have exercised exclusive jurisdiction.

The State of Maine had a right to arrest the depredations complained of.  It belonged to her to judge of the exigency of the occasion calling for her interference, and it is presumed that had the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick been correctly advised of the nature of the proceedings of the State of Maine he would not have regarded the transaction as requiring on his part any resort to force.  Each party claiming a right to the territory, and hence to the exclusive jurisdiction over it, it is manifest that to prevent the destruction of the timber by trespassers, acting against the authority of both, and at the same time avoid forcible collision between the contiguous governments during the pendency of negotiations concerning the title, resort must be had to the mutual exercise of jurisdiction in such extreme cases or to an amicable and temporary arrangement as to the limits within which it should be exercised by each party.  The understanding supposed to exist between the United States and Great Britain has been found heretofore sufficient for that purpose, and I believe will prove so hereafter if the parties on the frontier directly interested in the question are respectively governed by a just spirit of conciliation and forbearance.  If it shall be found, as there is now reason to apprehend, that there is, in the modes of construing that understanding by the two Governments, a difference not to be reconciled, I shall not hesitate to propose to Her Britannic Majesty’s Government a distinct arrangement for the temporary and mutual exercise of jurisdiction by means of which similar difficulties may in future be prevented.