But Franklin's idea did not die. Thomas Pownall, just out from England, a man later appointed Downing Street's Governor of Massachusetts, attended the Albany Colonial Conference. He heard the deliberations and talked with the commissioners and, as he himself wrote later, then "first conceived the idea and saw the necessity of a general British union."[187-1] The acquaintance he made there with Franklin grew into closest friendship. Both men wrote in favour of colonial representation;[187-2] and present in many ways an adequate epitome of the best thought of each branch of their civilization. Pownall recognized that the race would outgrow its London capital. In 1766 he wrote that representatives of the colonies, if apportioned according to population, would in time outnumber those of Great Britain, and "the centre of power instead of remaining fixed as it is now in Great Britain will, as the magnitude and interest of the colonies increases, be drawn out from these islands by the same laws of nature, analogous in all cases, by which the centre of gravity, now near the face of the sun, would, by an increase of the quantity of {188} matter in the planets, be drawn out beyond that surface."[188-1] This result, he thought, might be guarded against by stipulating that the colonial members were always to come to England.[188-2] A present-day Englander makes no such stipulation. Lord Milner in Johannesburg in 1904 stated: "I am an Imperialist out-and-out--and by an Imperialist I don't mean that which is commonly supposed to be indicated by the word. It is not the domination of Great Britain over the other parts of the Empire that is in my mind when I call myself an Imperialist out-and-out. I am an Englishman, but I am an Imperialist more than an Englishman, and I am prepared to see the Federal Council of the Empire sitting in Ottawa, in Sydney, in South Africa--sitting anywhere within the Empire--if in the great future we can only all hold together."[188-3]