But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation. It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols--concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action. While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal. Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney, that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen, could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing. Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.