that equity as well as law justified the
taxation of the colonies, for the expenditure which these taxes were
raised to meet was largely incurred in defending the colonies first
against the French and then against the Indians. The method of taxation
chosen was not new, neither had it been felt to be specially grievous.
Much revenue is raised in Great Britain and all European countries
to-day by that method, and there is probably no form of taxation at
which men grumble less. Its introduction into America had actually been
recommended on its merits by eminent Americans. It had been proposed by
the Governor of Pennsylvania as early as 1739. It had been approved at
one time by Benjamin Franklin himself. To-day it must seem to most of us
both less unjust and less oppressive than the Navigation Laws, which the
colonists bore without complaint.

As for the suggestion sometimes made that there was something
unprecedentedly outrageous about an English Parliament taxing people who
were unrepresented there, it is, in view of the constitution of that
Parliament, somewhat comic. If the Parliament of 1764 could only tax
those whom it represented, its field of taxation would be somewhat
narrow. Indeed, the talk about taxation without representation being
tyranny, however honestly it might be uttered by an American, could only
be conscious or unconscious hypocrisy in men like Burke, who were not
only passing their lives in governing and taxing people who were
unrepresented, but who were quite impenitently determined to resist any
attempt to get them represented even in the most imperfect fashion.

All this is true; and yet it is equally true that the proposed tax at
once excited across the Atlantic the most formidable discontent. Of this
discontent we may perhaps summarize the immediate causes as follows.
Firstly, no English minister or Parliament had, as a fact, ever before
attempted to tax the colonies. That important feature of the case
distinguished it from that of the Navigation Laws, which had
prescription on their side. Then, if the right to tax were once
admitted, no one could say how far it would be pushed. Under the
Navigation Laws the colonists knew just how far they were restricted,
and they knew that within the limits of such restrictions they could
still prosper. But if once the claim of the British Parliament to tax
were quietly accepted, it seemed likely enough that every British
Minister who had nowhere else to turn