In the all-important question of extent of territory, where Spain and France would have limited the United States to the east of the Alleghany Mountains, Great Britain was persuaded without great difficulty, having once conceded independence to the United States, to yield the boundaries which she herself had formerly claimed--from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Mississippi River on the west, and from Canada on the north to the southern boundary of Georgia.

Unfortunately the northern line, through ignorance and carelessness rather than through malice, was left uncertain at various points and became the subject of almost continuous controversy until the last bit of it was settled in 1911.* * See Lord Bryce's Introduction (p.

xxiv) to W.A.Dunning.
"The British Empire and the United States" (1914).
The fisheries of the North Atlantic, for which Newfoundland served as the chief entrepot, had been one of the great assets of North America from the time of its discovery.

They had been one of the chief prizes at stake in the struggle between the French and the British for the possession of the continent, and they had been of so much value that a British statute of 1775 which cut off the New England fisheries was regarded, even after the "intolerable acts" of the previous year, as the height of punishment for New England.

Many Englishmen would have been glad to see the Americans excluded from these fisheries, but John Adams, when he arrived from The Hague, displayed an appreciation of New England interests and the quality of his temper as well by flatly refusing to agree to any treaty which did not allow full fishing privileges.