The concept of a fully independent New Zealand sharing the person of the sovereign with the United Kingdom and other countries only emerged gradually over time through constitutional convention. A series of Imperial Conferences held in London, from 1917 on, resulted in the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which provided that the United Kingdom and the Dominions were to considered as "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown". The governor-general of New Zealand, as with all the other governors-general of the empire, became the direct representative of the monarch in person, rather than a diplomatic channel between the New Zealand and British governments.