verily thought our good people of Maine were playing a sort of Yankee trick, in pretending that they would reject the award, for fear that their over-eagerness would prevent Great Britain from doing so. 'I happen to know,' as the reviewers say, that one ex-governor of Maine thought it advisable to accept, with the expectation that what we should get from the general government for Rouse's Point, and the fort built on it, at an expense, I believe, of $300,000, and from the sale of the land awarded us joining the north border of the State of New York, would be more than an equivalent for the small part of the disputed territory to be ceded to Great Britain. The difficulty was with us,-for I am a Maine man myself, but of neither party in politics, and run the risk of being mobbed when I get home, by both parties; but I must do my duty, regardless of consequences; and if the loss of one life will save my country from war, she is welcome to mine. The difficulty is, that both political parties made the boundary question a hobby-horse to ride into power on, and those who talked biggest about State rights, and the glory of Maine, and her ability to cope single-handed with Great Britain, got the votes. Thus we have got ourselves worked up into the delirium of a war-fever; and, as usual, in all such cases, consider moderate men as traitors and enemies to the state. The same spirit seems to have run through the country; and that man is esteemed the greatest patriot who is most ready to involve his country in war for any cause, or for no cause, and it is the same in all other countries, Christian or pagan.

PROGRESS OF THE CONTROVERSY.

Our refusal of King William's award threw the whole matter back into its former condition. Negotiation has continued, but failed to unite the parties. We insist on our construction of the treaty of 1783; England, deeming it impossible to determine the boundary by the contradictory terms of that treaty, is strenuous for a conventional line; and meanwhile causes of jealousy and collision have been multiplying. It was understood. if not expressly agreed, that each party should, till the termination of the controversy, retain possession of whatever territory had actually been under its jurisdiction, but cautiously abstain from encroaching upon the limits of the other. Here was a point of great delicacy and danger. Each party claimed the whole territory in dispute; each had exercised jurisdiction over more or less of it; and, as it was well nigh impossible to determine precisely at what point of an almost unbroken forest, British authority stopped, and American began, their respective claims of jurisdiction came ere-long into direct, angry collision.

The State of Maine has never been at ease on this subject; and after occasionally hesitating whether to relinquish or compromise a part of her claim for the sake of peace, she has for a few years past been very strenuous for what she conceives to be her rights in the case. The contest has become a hobby,on which both of her political parties have sought to ride into favor and power. Her last governor sent commissioners to ascertain, by actual survey, the boundary marked out in the treaty of 1783; their report confirmed the popular opinion in favor of her claim; and her present governor, wishing to make the most of this hobby, and resolved not to be outdone by his predecessor, called a secret session of her legislature on the 24th of January, and secured the adoption of measures for expelling trespassers from that part of the disputed territory over which Maine, whether rightfully or not, had actually exercised jurisdiction in various ways. Some two hundred men were despatched as an armed posse, to assist the land-agent in arresting the depredators who were said to be cutting down the best of the timber. The agent, decoyed by the trespassers, was taken to Fredericton, N. B., and lodged in jail; and the British warden, appointed over the same territory, was seized, and brought to Bangor, Me.

Here the collision struck fire. Sir John Harvey, governor of New Brunswick, resisted the claim of Maine to jurisdiction over the valley of the Aroostook, from which she had sent a force to expel trespassers, issued his proclamation against the movement as an invasion of her majesty's dominions, and despatched to Gov. Fairfield a message complaining of the act, and saying that he was instructed to hold that part of the disputed territory under his exclusive jurisdiction until the dispute about it should be brought to a close, and that, unless the troops of Maine were withdrawn, he should be compelled either to expel them by force, or disobey the instructions of his government.

The effect of this announcement is well known. It kindled a blaze all over Maine, and more or less through the whole land. Gov. Fairfield called at once for some ten or twelve thousand troops, and the legislature unanimously voted $800,000, to defend the State against what was called a threatened invasion, and to assert by the sword her claim to jurisdiction over the territory in dispute. She appealed to Massachusetts as half owner of the soil, and to the general government for military aid in settling at once this protracted and vexatious controversy. The President issued his proclamation asserting the right of Maine to the disputed territory, but recommending her to withdraw her troops, and leave the

matter to be adjusted between the governments of Great Britain and the United States; our Secretary of State, and the British minister at Washington, published a protocol, advising a cessation of all military movements on both sides; but Congress burst at once into a blaze, and passed at a dash the strong acts of $10,000,000, and 50,000 men, to be used by the President at discretion, for the defence of the country. Here the matter stood at the close of the last session of Congress.

APPEAL TO THE FRIENDS OF PEACE, THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES.*

BRETHREN AND FRIENDS,-A crisis has come which demands our united efforts for the preservation of peace between ourselves and a nation from whose enmity we have more to fear, and from whose friendship more to hope for, than from any other nation on the globe. In the present state of feeling, we should expect little or no success from any appeal we could make to politicians; and we therefore turn to the intelligent, pious and philanthropic portion of the community, who hold in their hands a moral power sufficient to avert the catastrophe which now threatens us.

We need not stop to review in detail the steps which have brought us to a crisis so deeply deplorable. The executive of Maine, under cover of expelling trespassers from her soil, has sent an army to take military possession of lands in dispute between Great Britain and the United States; the governor of New Brunswick complains of this act as an encroachment upon the jurisdiction of his sovereign, and says his instructions will oblige him, unless those troops are withdrawn, to repel them by force; and anon we hear from Maine an earnest, impatient call for aid in asserting her claim to the disputed territory by the sword, and a cry for blood in the last resort, echoed through the land by a class of politicians and presses that loudly insist on war as the only means of settling the long-protracted dispute concerning our north-eastern boun

*This Appeal, issued by our Committee as soon as they saw any serious ground of alarm, was sent to more than fifty newspapers, nearly all religious; but so few of them, not one in five, published it, that we copy it, partly to record our testimony in the case, and partly to let our friends see what sort of a document it was that so many Christian editors excluded from their columns, and not a solitary paper of any kind in Maine could be persuaded to insert. We rejoice in the assurance, however, that it has met a warm response from the greater part of those who have read it, and trust that Christians, even in Maine, will, when fully recovered from their war-fever, commend us for the prompt and bold stand we took at a time when few were found to lift their voice for moderation. and peace.

dary. The storm has not yet come; but we hear the mutterings of the distant thunder. The dogs of war are still chained; but they are growling in their kennel, and waxing fierce for blood. The cauldron of war-passions is even now beginning to seethe; and unless the friends of peace rally soon to check this burst of popular excitement, it may ere-long sweep in a gulf-stream over the country, and drift us into a war fraught with an amount of guilt and mischief utterly incalculable.

Such a catastrophe it is now in the power of good men to prevent. There are in our country about fifteen thousand ministers of the gospel, not less than one million and a half professed disciples of the Prince of Peace, and some fifty religious papers sending their influence into almost every neighborhood in the land, besides millions of virtuous, philanthropic, reflecting citizens, ready at a proper call to rally on the side of peace; and, if only one half, or even one quarter of all these would at once array themselves firmly against war in any event of this controversy, our rulers would be held back from bloodshed long enough for passion to cool, and reason to regain her ascendency, and devise better means than bullets and bayonets for the settlement of such a dispute between civilized men. The friends of peace among us, without leaders, or organs, know not their own strength; but if every religious press, every minister, every Christian, and every friend of his country and his species, would, without regard to sect or party, take an open, bold, decided stand against a resort to arms in this case, all the war-clouds now in our horizon would soon be dissipated.

The

We call, then, upon all such persons to bear their solemn, unflinching testimony against these war-movements. lowest friends of peace must regard them as utterly, most glaringly inconsistent with the gospel; and the war-sentiments now echoed and reëchoed through the land, we deem a stigma on our character as a Christian people. Not a few political leaders of each party talk on this subject more like heathens and savages than the representatives of a Christian community; and we beseech not only the followers of Christ, but all sober, virtuous persons among us, to frown upon these bloody sentiments as a disgrace not to be borne in silence. What! are we tacitly to acquiesce in the savage demand, that 'the whole country be deluged with blood, and every field whitened with the bones of our citizens,' sooner than submit the point in dispute to the slow, uncertain result of negotiation or reference! This the spirit, these the doctrines, of that gospel which bids us follow peace with all men and love even our enemies, and turn the other cheek to the smiter, and resist not evil, but

overcome it with good, and be patient, kind and long-suffering under the worst injuries! Christianity allow the wholesale butcheries of war for the settlement of national boundaries, and conflicting claims of jurisdiction! No; every dollar wasted, would be a species of robbery; every death a murder; and every principle of the gospel would require us to resist such a war by all lawful means, and refuse to aid it by our services, our money, or our influence.

How suicidal, too, would be the policy of such a contest! The whole territory in dispute is worth only a few millions of dollars; but we could not even begin the war in earnest without an outlay of some fifty or a hundred millions, nor carry it on without an equal expenditure every year, and an incidental loss to the nation of several times as much. It would take one or two thousand millions to cover the probable waste of property by both parties, in a protracted contest about a forest not worth the two hundredth part of such a sum; and when we farther anticipate its sacrifice of human life, the domestic anguish and desolation it would send through the land, its ruin of immortal souls by thousands, the floods of vice and crime it would pour over the whole country, and all its baleful influences on the cause of religion, on the progress of general improvemen', and upon every enterprise of Christian benevolence or reform, we cannot refrain from recording before heaven and earth our most solemn protest against every proposal of war with the land of our fathers and brethren.

Tell us the use of such a contest. Waste millions on millions of treasure; cripple our commerce, our manufactures, all our gainful enterprises; drench the land in blood, and fill it with the wailings of widows and orphans; roll over ourselves, over England, over the world, a flood of the direst evils; would all this end the dispute? Every school-boy knows that we must, after all, cease to fight, and resort to negotiation or reference as the only means of terminating any quarrel between civilized nations. To such expedients we must come, sooner or later; and the only question is, whether we shall do so before or after fighting! Must scores or hundreds of thousands of the people die a tiger's death on the field of battle, just to make rulers willing now to use what they know perfectly well to be the only means that can ever settle the dispute?

Every plea for war in this case we are constrained to discard as altogether insufficient. Do you say we are clearly in the right? We neither deny nor doubt the justness of our claims; nor would we have them surrendered; but we protest against this barbarous method of asserting them. Do you reply that we have no other means left? If it were so, would

VOL. II.-NO. XVI.

24