[6] Parliament was divided then, as now, into two houses--the Lords, consisting of nobles and clergy, and the Commons, consisting then of two members elected by each county and two elected by each of certain towns. Some change was made in the list of towns thus represented in Parliament before the sixteenth century, but no change had been made since, though many of them had lost all or most of their population. Thus Old Sarum had become a green mound; its population had all drifted away to Salisbury. A member of the Commons, so the story runs, once said: "I am the member from Ludgesshall. I am also the population of Ludgesshall. When the sheriff's writ comes, I announce the election, attend the poll, deposit my vote for myself, sign the return, and here I am." When a town disappeared, the landowner of the soil on which it once stood appointed the two members. Such towns were called "rotten boroughs," "pocket boroughs," "nomination boroughs." [7] Patrick Henry was born in Virginia in 1736. As a youth he was dull and indolent and gave no sign of coming greatness. After two failures as a storekeeper and one as a farmer he turned in desperation to law, read a few books, and with difficulty passed the examination necessary for admittance to the bar. Henry had now found his true vocation. Business came to him, and one day in 1763 he argued the weak (but popular) side of a case with such eloquence that he carried court and jury with him, and it is said was carried out of the courthouse on the shoulders of the people. He was now famous, and in 1765 was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses to represent the county in which he had lived, just in time to take part in the proceedings on the Stamp Act. His part was to move the resolutions and support them in a fiery and eloquent speech, of which one passage has been preserved. Recalling the fate of tyrants of other times, he exclaimed, "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third--." "Treason! treason!" shouted the Speaker. "Treason! treason!" shouted the members. To which Henry answered, "and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it." [8] In Canada and the West Indies the stamp tax was not resisted, and there stamps were used. [9] When Parliament was considering the repeal, Benjamin Franklin, then in London as agent for Pennsylvania and other colonies, was called before a committee and examined as to the state of colonial affairs; read his answers in Hart's _American History told by Contemporaries_, Vol. II, pp. 407-411. Pitt in a great speech declared, "The kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies, because they are unrepresented in Parliament. I rejoice that America has resisted." Edmund Burke, one of the greatest of Irish orators, took the same view.