e defenders of colonial rights were inclined to
greater moderation, in point of constitutional theory they were now
constrained to take a more radical stand. When Franklin, in his
examination before the House of Commons in 1766, was pressed by
Townshend to say whether Americans might not as readily object to
external as to internal taxes, he shrewdly replied: "Many arguments have
lately been used here to show them that there is no difference;--at
present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be
convinced by these arguments." That time was now at hand. As early as
1766, Richard Bland, of Virginia, had declared that the colonies, like
Hanover, were bound to England only through the Crown. This might be
over-bold; but the old argument was inadequate to meet the present
dangers, inasmuch as the Townshend Acts, the establishment of troops in
Boston and New York, and the attempt to force Massachusetts to rescind
her resolutions of protest, all seemed more designed to restrict the
legislative independence of the colonies than to assert the right of
Parliamentary taxation. Franklin himself, to whom it scarcely occurred
in 1765 that the legality of the Stamp Act might be denied, could not
now master the Massachusetts principle of "subordination," or understand
what that distinction was which Dickinson labored to draw between the
right of taxing the colonies and the right of regulating their trade.
"The more I have thought and read on the subject," he wrote in 1768,
"the more I find ... that no middle doctrine can well be maintained, I
mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of
either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for
us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the
arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the
former." Before the Townshend duties were repealed, the colonists were
entirely familiar with the doctrine of complete legislative
independence; and the popular cry of "no representation no taxation"
began to be replaced by the far more radical cry of "no representation
no legislation."

In support of argument and protest, the colonists once more resorted to
the practice of non-importation. The earliest agreement was signed by
Boston merchants in October, 1767. But a far more rigid association, not
to import with trifling exceptions any goods from England or Holland,
was formed in New York in August, 1768,