It can not be denied that the line claimed by the United States fulfills at least one of the conditions.  The streams which flow from one side of it fall without exception into the river St. Lawrence.  The adverse line claimed by Great Britain in the reference to the King of the Netherlands divides until within a few miles of Mars Hill waters which fall into the St. John from those of the Penobscot and Kennebec.  The latter do not discharge their waters directly into the ocean, but Sagadahock and Penobscot bays intervene, and the former falls into the Bay of Fundy; hence, according to the argument in respect to the Bay of Fundy, this line fulfills neither condition.

The line of Messrs. Featherstonhaugh and Mudge is even less in conformity to the terms of the treaty.  In order to find mountains to form a part of it they are compelled to go south of the source of branches of the Penobscot; thence from mountains long well known, at the sources of the Alleguash, well laid down on the rejected map of Mr. Johnson, it becomes entangled in the stream of the Aroostook, which it crosses more than once.  In neither part does it divide waters at all.  It then, as if to make its discrepancy with the line defined in the proclamation of 1763 apparent, crosses the St. John and extends to the south shore of the Bay of Chaleurs, although that instrument fixes the boundary of the Province of Quebec on the north shore of the bay.  In this part of its course it divides waters which fall into the said bay from those which fall into the St. John.  But the proclamation with whose terms this line is said to be identical directs that the highlands shall divide waters which fall into the St. Lawrence from those which fall into the sea.  If the branches of the Bay of Chaleurs fulfill the first condition, which, however, is denied, the St. John must fulfill the latter.  It therefore falls into the Atlantic Ocean, and as the identity of the boundary of the treaty with that of the proclamation of 1763 and act of 1774 is admitted, then is the St. John an Atlantic river, and the line claimed by the United States fulfills both conditions, and is the only line to the west of the meridian of the St. Croix which can possibly do so.

The choice of a line different from that presented to the choice of the King of the Netherlands is no new instance of the uncertainty which has affected all the forms in which Great Britain has urged her claim.

In fact, nothing shows more conclusively the weakness of the ground on which the British claim rests than the continual changes which it has been necessary to make in order to found any feasible argument upon it.[60] In the discussion of 1798 it was maintained on the part of Great Britain that the meridian line must cross the St. John River; in the argument before the commissioners under the fifth article of the treaty of Ghent it was denied that it ever could have been the intention of the framers of the treaty of 1783