This plan, said Franklin, "is not altogether to my mind, but it is as I could get it." It should be observed, to the credit of its author, that this scheme, long afterward known as the "Albany Plan," contemplated the formation of a self-sustaining federal government, and not of a mere league. As Frothingham well says, "It designed to confer on the representatives of the people the power of making laws acting directly on individuals, and appointing officers to execute them, and yet not to interfere with the execution of the laws operating on the same individuals by the local officers." It would have erected "a public authority as obligatory in its sphere as the local governments were in their spheres." In this respect it was much more complete than the scheme of confederation agreed on in Congress in 1777, and it afforded a valuable precedent for the more elaborate and perfect Federal Constitution of 1787. It was in its main features a noble scheme, and the great statesman who devised it was already looking forward to the immense growth of the American Union, though he had not yet foreseen the separation of the colonies from the mother-country. In less than a century, he said, the great country behind the Alleghanies must become "a populous and powerful dominion;" and he recommended that two new colonies should at once be founded in the West,--the one on Lake Erie, the other in the valley of the Ohio,--with free chartered governments like those of Rhode Island and Connecticut. [Portrait: W Shirley] [Sidenote: Rejection of the plan] [Sidenote: Shirley recommends a stamp act]