In pursuance of the requirements of the call for the Convention, then, immediately after the signing of the Constitution, a committee was appointed to draft a project concerning relations with the United States. It consisted of Diego Tamayo, Gonzalo de Quesada, Juan Gualberto Gomez, Enrique Villuendas, and Manuel Ramon Silva. These gentlemen conferred with General Wood, to learn the wishes of President McKinley, and then drafted a scheme which they presented to the Convention and which that body adopted on February 27. Unfortunately between the President's wishes and the committee's project there were radical differences. The President, through his Secretary of War, Elihu Root, had on February 9 expressed with much circumstance and detail and a wealth of argument the relationship which the United States government regarded as essential. It amounted to this: That the Cuban government should never make any treaty or engagement which would impair its independence, nor make any special agreement with any foreign power without the consent of the United States; that it should contract no public debt in excess of the capacity of the ordinary revenues of the island; that the United States should have the right of intervention for the preservation of Cuban independence and the maintenance of a stable government; that all the acts of the American Military Administration should be validated; and that the United States should be permitted to acquire and to hold naval stations in Cuba at certain points. The Committee of the Convention reported that in its judgment some of these conditions were unacceptable, inasmuch as they impaired the independence of Cuba. So it proposed and the Convention adopted proposals to this effect: That Cuba should never impair her independence by any agreement with any power, not excepting the United States; that she should never permit her territory to be used as a base or war against the United States; that she accepted the obligations expressed and implied in the Treaty of Paris; that she should validate the acts of the Military Government "for the good government of Cuba"; and that the United States and Cuba should regulate their commercial relations by means of a reciprocity treaty.