for a revenue would turn to the
unrepresented colonies, which would furnish supply after supply until
they were "bled white." That was a perfectly sound, practical
consideration, and it naturally appealed with especial force to
mercantile communities like that of Boston.

But if we assume that it was the only consideration involved, we shall
misunderstand all that followed, and be quite unprepared for the
sweeping victory of a purely doctrinal political creed which brought
about the huge domestic revolution of which the breaking of the ties
with England was but an aspect. The colonists did feel it unjust that
they should be taxed by an authority which was in no way responsible to
them; and they so felt it because, as has already been pointed out, they
enjoyed in the management of their everyday affairs a large measure of
practical democracy. Therein they differed from the English, who, being
habitually governed by an oligarchy, did not feel it extraordinary that
the same oligarchy should tax them. The Americans for the most part
governed themselves, and the oligarchy came in only as an alien and
unnatural thing levying taxes. Therefore it was resisted.

The resistance was at first largely instinctive. The formulation of the
democratic creed which should justify it was still to come. Yet already
there were voices, especially in Virginia, which adumbrated the
incomparable phrases of the greatest of Virginians. Already Richard
Bland had appealed to "the law of Nature and those rights of mankind
that flow from it." Already Patrick Henry had said, "Give me liberty or
give me death!"

It was but a foreshadowing of the struggle to come. In 1766 the
Rockingham Whigs, having come into power upon the fall of Grenville,
after some hesitation repealed the Stamp Act, reaffirming at the same
time the abstract right of Parliament to tax the colonies. America was
for the time quieted. There followed in England a succession of weak
Ministries, all, of course, drawn from the same oligarchical class, and
all of much the same political temper, but all at issue with each other,
and all more or less permanently at issue with the King. As a mere
by-product of one of the multitudinous intrigues to which this situation
gave rise, Charles Townshend, a brilliant young Whig orator who had
become Chancellor of the Exchequer, revived in 1768 the project of
taxing the American colonies. This was now proposed in the form of a
series of duties levi