Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol I).djvu/55

 CH. I.] § 23. Each nation had granted and partially settled the country, denominated by the French, Acadie, and by the English, Nova Scotia. By the 12th article of the treaty of Utrecht, made in 1713 his most Christian Majesty ceded to the Queen of Great Britain, "all Nova Scotia or Acadie, with its ancient boundaries." A great part of the ceded territory was in the possession of the Indians, and the extent of the cession could not be adjusted by the commissioners, to whom it was to be referred. The treaty of Aix la Chapelle, which was made on the principle of the status ante bellum, did not remove this subject of controversy. Commissioners for its adjustment were appointed, whose very able and elaborate, though unsuccessful arguments, in favour of the title of their respective sovereigns, show how entirely each relied on the title given by discovery to lands remaining in the possession of Indians.

§ 24. After the termination of this fruitless discussion, the subject was transferred to Europe, and taken up by the cabinets of Versailles and London. This controversy embraced not only the boundaries of New-England, Nova Scotia, and that part of Canada, which adjoined those colonies, but embraced our whole western country also. France contended not only, that the St. Lawrence was to be considered as the centre of Canada, but that the Ohio was within that colony. She founded this claim on discovery, and on having used that river for the transportation of troops in a war with some southern Indians. This river was comprehended in the chartered limits of Virginia; but, though the right of England to a reasonable extent of country, in virtue of her discovery of the seacoast, and of the settlements she made on it, was not to be questioned; her claim of all the lands to the Pacific ocean, because she had discovered the