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240 been deemed a suitable precaution to urge the following propositions. It cannot be arrogance which asserts them as materials of a monument of the rights of our employers, which will become firm by time, when properly combined and cemented by your own reflections. Ifany feeling has been displayed on my part, it has been indulged with a view of eliciting results which it was believed would be salutary and acceptable. At the same time there has been no intention to abandon those prudential considerations entirely consistent with a free assertion of what it might be supposed the people, through their Representatives, would eventually approve and sustain.

   At the period of forming the treaty of 1783, Massachusetts and the other Colonies were independent of each other, as to territorial rights. The United States, as such, did not exist.
    Although the Colonies constituted common agents to form that treaty, the territorial rights secured did not, by virtue of that instrument, accrue to the nation, but were merely acknowledged and confirmed by it to the exciting individual corporations, according to preexisting grants, crown lands only being excepted.