fter that
date.

This earliest state paper of Samuel Adams contained the first formal and
public denial of the right of Parliament to tax the colonies, because it
was not a body in which their people were represented. The resolutions
were adopted by the Massachusetts assembly, and a similar action was
taken by Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South
Carolina. The colonies professed their willingness to raise money in
answer to requisitions upon their assemblies, which were the only bodies
competent to lay taxes in America. Memorials stating these views were
sent to England, and the colony of Pennsylvania sent Dr. Franklin to
represent its case at the British court. Franklin remained in London
until the spring of 1775 as agent first for Pennsylvania, afterward for
Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Georgia,--a kind of diplomatic
representative of the views and claims of the Americans.

[Sidenote: The Virginia Resolutions, 1765.]

Grenville told Franklin that he wished to do things as pleasantly as
possible, and was not disposed to insist upon the Stamp Act, if the
Americans could suggest anything better. But when it appeared that no
alternative was offered except to fall back upon the old clumsy system
of requisitions, Grenville naturally replied that there ought to be some
more efficient method of raising money for the defence of the frontier.
Accordingly in March, 1765, the Stamp Act was passed, with so little
debate that people hardly noticed what was going on. But when the news
reached America there was an outburst of wrath that was soon heard and
felt in London. In May the Virginia legislature was assembled. George
Washington was sitting there in his seat, and Thomas Jefferson, then a
law-student, was listening eagerly from outside the door, when Patrick
Henry introduced the famous resolutions in which he declared, among
other things, that an attempt to vest the power of taxation in any other
body than the colonial assembly was a menace to the common freedom of
Englishmen, whether in Britain or in America, and that the people of
Virginia were not bound to obey any law enacted in disregard of this
principle. The language of the resolutions was bold enough, but a keener
edge was put upon it by the defiant note which rang out from Henry in
the course of the debate, when he commended the example of Tarquin and
Caesar and Charles I. to the attention of George III. "If this be
treason," he exclaimed, a