he Carolinas was fixed. Their pioneers could not pass the mountains and
settle in the fertile valleys of the Ohio and its branches.

CHAPTER 12

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION

[Sidenote: George III.]

[Sidenote: George Grenville.]

[Sidenote: The British Parliament.]

107. George III and George Grenville.--George III became king in
1760. He was a narrow, stupid, well-meaning, ignorant young man of
twenty-one. He soon found in George Grenville a narrow, dull,
well-meaning lawyer, a man who would do what he was told. So George
Grenville became the head of the government. To him the law was the law.
If he wished to do a thing and could find the law for it, he asked for
nothing more. His military advisers told him that an army must be kept
in America for years. It was Grenville's business to find the money to
support this army. Great Britain was burdened with a national debt. The
army was to be maintained, partly, at least, for the protection of the
colonists. Why should they not pay a part of the cost of maintaining it?
Parliament was the supreme power in the British Empire. It controlled
the king, the church, the army, and the navy. Surely a Parliament that
had all this power could tax the colonists. At all events, Grenville
thought it could, and Parliament passed the Stamp Act to tax them.

[Sidenote: Taxation and representation.]

[Sidenote: Henry's resolutions, 1765. _Higginson_, 161-164; _McMaster_,
112-114.]

108. Henry's Resolutions, 1765.--The colonists, however, with one
voice, declared that Parliament had no power to tax them. Taxes, they
said, could be voted only by themselves or their representatives. They
were represented in their own colonial assemblies, and nowhere else.
Patrick Henry was now a member of the Virginia assembly. He had just
been elected for the first time. But as none of the older members of the
assembly proposed any action, Henry tore a leaf from an old law-book and
wrote on it a set of resolutions. These he presented in a burning
speech, upholding the rights of the Virginians. He said that to tax them
by act of Parliament was tyranny. "Caesar and Tarquin had each his
Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III"--"Treason, treason,"
shouted the speaker. "May profit by their example," slowly Henry went
on. "If that be treason, make the most of it." The resolutions were
voted. In them the Virginians declared that they were not subject to
Acts of Parliament laying taxes o