The trouble between England and America had grown out of the need for a continental revenue and the lack of a continental government with taxing power--a weakness experienced throughout the Revolution and under the Confederation. In the absence of such a government, Parliament undertook to supply the place of such a power; but the Americans blocked the way by an appeal to the principle that had been asserted by Simon de Montford's Parliament in 1265 and admitted by Edward I. in 1301--"No taxation without representation." So the Stamp Act of 1765 was repealed. The necessity for a continental revenue, nevertheless, remained, and in the effort to adopt some expedient, like the duty on tea, Crown and Colonies became involved in bitter disputes. The idea of independence, however, had, in May, 1774, scarcely entered the mind of the wildest New York radical. In their instructions to delegates to the first Continental Congress, convened in September, 1774, the Colonies made no mention of it. Even in May, 1775, the Sons of Liberty in Philadelphia cautioned John Adams not to use the word, since "it is as unpopular in all the Middle States as the Stamp Act itself."[1] Washington wrote from the Congress that independence was then not "desired by any thinking man in America."[2] [Footnote 1: E.B. Andrews, _History of the United States_, Vol. 1, p. 172.] [Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 172.] The differences, therefore, between the Committees of Fifty and Fifty-one were merely political. One favoured agitation for the purpose of arousing resistance to the King's summary methods--the other preferred a more orderly but not less forceful way of making known their opposition. Members of both committees were patriots in the highest and best sense, yet each faction fancied itself the only patriotic, public spirited and independent party. It was during these months of discord that Alexander Hamilton, then a lad of seventeen, astonished his listeners at the historic meeting "in the Fields,"[3] with the cogency of his arguments and the wonderful flights of an unpremeditated eloquence while denouncing the act of Parliament which closed the port of Boston. Hamilton had already been a year in America attending the Elizabethtown grammar school, conducted under the patronage of William Livingston, soon to become the famous war governor of New Jersey. This experience quickened the young man's insight into the vexed relations between the Colonies and the Crown, and shattered his English predilections in favour of the little minds that Burke thought so ill-suited to a great empire. A visit to Boston shortly after the "tea party" seems also to have had the effect of crowding his mind with thoughts, deeply and significantly freighted with the sentiment of liberty, which were soon to make memorable the occasion of their first utterance. [Footnote 3: City Hall Park.]