Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/337

There are probably but few people in New Brunswick, who, knowing anything at all about the boundary disputes terminated by the Ashburton treaty of 1842, would not claim that this province was sadly defrauded by that treaty and through it lost a great and valuable territory belonging to her by right. This statement is passed along from one generation to another, accepted without question and repeated without investigation. Not only is it current in conversation, but it has even been promulgated by high officials in public addresses. But this condemnation of the Ashburton treaty is not confined to New Brunswick alone, for it is equally intense and widespread in the other country affected by it, the state of Maine, which claims that it, and not New Brunswick, was the heavy loser. Naturally, as a New Brunswicker, I formerly thought our own view of the case necessarily the correct one, but an investigation of the whole subject, so far from confirming this opinion, has forced me to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Maine is right and we are wrong, that the Ashburton treaty took from Maine much territory awarded her by the treaty of 1783, and