It seemed a strange defiance, no doubt, to come from loyal Virginia. The Stamp Act was not, in fact, oppressive or unreasonable. Why should it so kindle the anger of the colonies that the sovereign Parliament, which had for many a day levied indirect charges upon them by means of the many acts concerning trade and manufactures, now laid a moderate direct tax upon them, the proceeds of which were to be spent upon their own protection and administration? Because, though it might be the sovereign legislature of the empire, Parliament was not in their view the direct sovereign legislature of America. No one could truly say that Parliament had been the sovereign power even of England before 1688, that notable year in which it had, by a revolution, changed the succession to the throne and begun the making and unmaking of governments. The colonies had most of them been set up before that momentous year of change, while the Parliament was still only a body of representatives associated with the crown, with the right to criticise and restrain it, but with no right to usurp its prerogatives; entitled to be consulted, but not licensed to rule. The King, not the Parliament, had chartered the colonies; and they conceived their assemblies to be associated with him as Parliament itself had been in the older days before the Revolution of 1688: to vote him grants, assent to taxation, and with his consent make the laws they were to live under. He stood, they thought, in the same relation to all the legislatures of his realm: to the Parliament in England and to the assemblies in America. It was the fundamental principle of the English constitution, as all agreed, that the King’s subjects should be associated with him in government by representation; and, since the Americans could not be represented in Parliament, and were, by his own authority, represented in local assemblies, he must deal with them, not through Parliament, but through those assemblies.