By the close of the month the conference had brought its labours to a conclusion. Its seventy-two resolutions embodied the framework of confederation. The remaining task was to obtain the confirmation of the various colonial legislatures, and in the following February the resolutions came before the Canadian parliament. Provided that the coalition of party leaders held together, their acceptance was assured. The debate was none the less critical. The ministers had to justify the resolutions not merely before parliament, but before Canadian public opinion. To render their work difficult Dorion and Sandfield Macdonald stirred up an animated opposition, and some feared that the coalition might break. The government's case for union was contained in five masterly speeches by Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Galt, and McGee. Whatever might be the outstanding position of Brown and Macdonald as political leaders wheeling the party machines to make confederation possible, the most vivid orator of the projected Dominion was McGee. "When he rose to speak," said a reporter in the press gallery, "there was the greatest temptation to throw down my pencil and just listen." Fired by the event to the white heat of enthusiasm, he delivered one of his most powerful orations, infused with the imagination and glowing rhetoric of his best performances. He enumerated the military and political reasons for confederation which in the previous eight years he had steadily pleaded. The prospective commercial benefits of union were patent--free access to the sea, an extended market, the breaking down of hostile tariffs, and enhanced credit with England. Nothing short of a confederation would bring such advantages. A Zollverein or commercial union would not satisfy. "If any one for a moment will remember that the trade of the whole front of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia gravitates at present alongshore to Portland and Boston, while the trade of Upper Canada, west of Kingston, has long gravitated across the lakes to New York, he will see, I think, that a mere Zollverein treaty without a strong political end to serve, and some political power at its back, would be in our new circumstances merely waste paper."