The agreement could only have reference to the Madawaska settlements as confined within their actual limits at the time it was subscribed.  The undersigned in his note of the 24th of December last stated the reasons why the mouth of Fish River and the portion of the valley of the St. John through which it passes could in no proper sense be considered as embraced in the Madawaska settlements.  Were the United States to admit the pretension set up on the part of Great Britain to give to the Madawaska settlements a degree of constructive extension that might at this time suit the purposes of Her Majesty’s colonial authorities, those settlements might soon be made with like justice to embrace any portions of the disputed territory, and the right given to the Province of New Brunswick to occupy them temporarily and for a special purpose might by inference quite as plausible give the jurisdiction exercised by Her Majesty’s authorities an extent which would render the present state of the question, so long as it could be maintained, equivalent to a decision on the merits of the whole controversy in favor of Great Britain.  If the small settlement at Madawaska on the north side of the St. John means the whole valley of that river, if a boom across the Fish River and a station of a small posse on the south side of the St. John at the mouth of Fish River is a disturbance of that settlement, which is 25 miles below, within the meaning of the agreement, it is difficult to conceive that there are any limitations to the pretensions of Her Majesty’s Government under it or how the State of Maine could exercise the preventive power with regard to trespassers, which was on her part the great object of the temporary arrangement.  The movements of British troops lately witnessed in the disputed territory and the erection of military works for their protection and accommodation, of which authentic information recently received at the Department of State has been communicated to Mr. Fox, impart a still graver aspect to the matter immediately under consideration.  The fact of those military operations, established beyond a doubt, left unexplained or unsatisfactorily accounted for by Mr. Fox’s note of the 7th instant, continues an abiding cause of complaint on the part of the United States against Her Majesty’s colonial agents as inconsistent with arrangements whose main object was to divest a question already sufficiently perplexed and complicated from such embarrassments as those with which the proceedings of the British authorities can not fail to surround it.

If, as Mr. Fox must admit, the objects of the late agreements were the removal of all military force and the preservation of the property from further spoliations, leaving the possession and jurisdiction as they stood before the State of Maine found itself compelled to act against the trespassers, the President can not but consider that the conduct of the American local authorities strongly and most favorably contrasts