Massachusetts and the greater trading ports of the south felt the burden of the new policy more than the rest of the country felt it; but thoughtful men everywhere saw what it portended that Parliament should thus lay its hand directly upon the colonies to tax, and in some sort to govern, them. Quite as many men could tell you of the “parson’s case,” tried in quiet Hanover Court House in rural Virginia, as could tell you of Mr. Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance. It meant that the authorities in London were thrusting their hands into the affairs of Virginia just as they were thrusting them into the affairs of Massachusetts. Parson Maury had in that case set up an Order in Council by the ministers at home against an act of the Virginian House of Burgesses determining the value of the currency in which his salary was to be paid, and young Patrick Henry had sprung into sudden fame by declaring to the court very boldly against him that the crown had no right to override the self-government of Virginia. [Illustration: OLD CAPITOL AT WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA] The eloquence of that famous speech carried the young advocate to the House of Burgesses itself; and it was he who showed the colonies how to speak of the Stamp Act. The burgesses were in session when the news of that hateful law’s enactment reached Virginia. The young member waited patiently for the older members of the House to show the way in the new crisis,—Randolph and Pendleton and Nicholas, Richard Bland and George Wythe,—the men who had framed so weighty a protest and warning and sent so strong a remonstrance over sea only last year against this very measure. But when he saw that they would not lead, he sprang to the task himself, plain, country-bred though he was, and unschooled in that leadership; scribbled his resolutions on the fly-leaf of an old law-book, and carried them with a rush of eloquence that startled and swept the House, and set the tone for all the country. His resolutions not only declared the right of the colonies to tax themselves to be exclusive, and established beyond recall; they also declared that Virginians were not bound to obey the Parliament when it acted thus against established privilege, and that any one who should advocate obedience was an enemy to the colony. The sober second thought of the burgesses cut that defiant conclusion out at last,—after Mr. Henry had gone home; but the resolutions had already been sent post-haste through the colonies in their first form, unrevised and unsoftened, and had touched the feeling of every one who read them like a flame of fire. They were the first word of revolution; and no man ever thought just the same again after he had read them. [Illustration: GEORGE WYTHE]