The law of their view was not very sound or clear; but the common-sense of it was unassailable; and it rested upon unquestionable and long-standing practice, that best foundation of institutions. Their governments were no doubt, in law, subject to the government of Great Britain. Whoever ruled there had the legal right to rule in the colonies also, whether it were the King independent of Parliament, or the ministers dependent upon Parliament. The revolution of 1688 had radically altered the character of the whole structure, and perhaps the colonies could not, in strict constitutional theory, decline their logical part in the change. But no man in America had ever seen that revolution cross the seas. English statesmen might have changed their views, but the colonies had not changed theirs, nor the practice of their governments either. Their governments were from of old, and they meant to keep them intact and uncorrupted. They did not object to the amount or to the form of the tax; they objected only that they had not themselves imposed it. They dissented utterly from the opinion that Parliament had the right to tax them at all. It was that principle, and not the tax itself, which moved them so deeply. English statesmen claimed that the colonists were as much represented in Parliament as the thousands of Englishmen in England who did not have the right to vote for members of the Commons; and no doubt they were. The franchise was narrow in England, and not the whole population but only a few out of some classes of the people were actually represented in the Houses. Were not the interests represented there which America stood for? Perhaps so. But why govern the colonies through these remote and theoretical representatives when they had, and had always had, immediate and actual representatives of their own in their assemblies,—as ready and accessible an instrument of government as the House of Commons itself? The colonists were accustomed to actual representation, had for a century and more been dealt with by means of it, and were not willing now to reverse their history and become, instead of veritable states, merely detached and dependent pieces of England. This was the fire of principle which the Stamp Act kindled.