The consent of the legislature was considered sufficient by the governments of all the provinces except one, though the question had never been discussed at the polls. In New Brunswick alone was the legislature dissolved on the issue, and it was only after a second general election that the {374} legislature agreed to the union. In Nova Scotia, after much discussion and feeling, the legislature passed a resolution in favour of the measure, though a popular sentiment continued to exist against the union for several years. In the December of 1866 a second conference of delegates from the governments of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, was held at the Westminster Palace Hotel in London, and some modifications were made in the Quebec resolutions, chiefly with a view of meeting objections from the maritime provinces. In the early part of 1867 the imperial parliament, without a division, passed the statute known as the "British North America Act, 1867," which united in the first instance the province of Canada, now divided into Ontario and Quebec, with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and made provisions for the coming in of the other provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, British Columbia, and the admission of Rupert's Land and the great Northwest. From 1840 to 1867 the relations of Canada and the United States became much closer, and more than once assumed a dangerous phase. In 1840 the authorities of New York arrested one Macleod on the charge of having murdered a man employed in the _Caroline_, when she was seized by the loyalists during the outbreak of 1837. The matter gave rise to much correspondence between the governments of Great Britain and the United States, and to a great deal of irritation in Canada, but happily for the peace of the two countries the courts acquitted Macleod, as the evidence was clear he had {375} nothing to do with the seizure of the vessel. In 1842 the question of the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick was settled by what is generally known in Canada as "the Ashburton Capitulation." As a result of the settlement made by Mr. Daniel Webster on the part of the United States, and of Mr. Alexander Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, on behalf of Great Britain, the State of Maine now presses like a huge wedge into the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, and a Canadian railway is obliged to pass over American territory, which many Canadians still believe ought to be a part of the Canadian Dominion. In 1846 Great Britain yielded to the persistency of American statesmen, and agreed to accept the line 49 degrees to the Pacific coast, and the whole of Vancouver Island, which, for a while, seemed on the point of following the fate of Oregon, and becoming exclusively American territory. But the question of boundary was not even then settled, as the Island of San Juan, which lies in the channel between Vancouver and the mainland, and is mainly valuable as a