Sir Etienne P. Taché, who was then premier of Canada, was unanimously chosen president of the conference, and Major Hewitt Bernard, of the staff of the attorney-general west, private and confidential secretary. It was arranged that the convention should hold its meetings with closed doors, and it was laid down as a principle of the discussion that, as the matters to come up for debate were all of a novel character, no man should be prejudiced or held liable to the charge of inconsistency because he had changed his views in regard to any particular matter in the course of the discussion. It was also agreed that the vote, in case of a division, should be by provinces and not by numbers, Canada having two votes, representing Canada East and Canada West, and each of the other provinces one. This arrangement made it quite certain that the interests of the Maritime Provinces were not likely to be prejudiced by the result of the vote, or the work of the convention. It was soon decided that a federal union was to be preferred to a legislative union, and on the second day of the meeting the outlines of the proposed confederation were submitted in a series of resolutions by the Hon. John A. Macdonald. The general model of the proposed confederation was that of the United States, but with this difference, that whereas in the United States all powers not expressly given by the constitution to the federal government are held to belong to the several states, in the Canadian constitution all powers not expressly reserved to the several provinces were held to belong to the federal parliament. Thus in the United States the residuum of power is in the several states, while in Canada it is in the federal union and in the parliament of the Dominion. No doubt the recent example of the civil war in the United States, which was the result of an extreme assertion of state rights, was largely responsible for this feature of the Canadian constitution. It is clear, however, that it is a feature that is to be commended, because its tendency is to cause Canadians to regard themselves rather as Canadians than as belonging to any particular province, while in the United States the feeling of statehood is still very strong. There are, of course, many other contrasts between the Canadian confederation and the federal union of the United States, arising from radical differences in the system of government. Nothing like responsible government, as understood in the British empire, exists in the United States, while this essential feature had to be preserved in the Canadian constitution, not only with reference to the Dominion parliament, but also in the legislatures of the several provinces.