by the Stamp Act
Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would
prove, "from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable," and
render the colonists "unable to purchase the manufactures of Great
Britain."

But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or
rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the
Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of
Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue
in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the
cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the
multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation.
It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as
unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous
nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified
almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of
burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the
law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance,
round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the
issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect
without its material symbols--concrete and visible bundles of stamped
papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and
the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.

While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was
unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal.
Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted
that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the
colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves
to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick
Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney,
that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen,
could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the
right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing.
Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes
derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were
distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to
impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon
those who were re