Turning to _An Historical Review_ to learn the political principles sanctioning the Assembly's grievances against its feudal lords, one finds that the colonists conceived it "our duty to defend the rights and privileges we enjoy under the royal charter."[i-287] Secondly, they reminded the lords that the laws agreed upon in England (prior to the settling of Pennsylvania) were "of the nature of an original compact between the proprietary and the freemen, and as such were reciprocally received and executed."[i-288] Thirdly, they demanded the right to exercise the "birthright of every British subject," "to have a property of [their] own, in [their] estate, person, and reputation; subject only to laws enacted by [their] own concurrence, either in person or by [their] representatives."[i-289] Fourthly, they resisted the proprietors on basis of their possession of natural rights, "antecedent to all laws."[i-290] The editor of the protest charged that "It is the cause of every man who deserves to be free, everywhere."[i-291] It is ironic that this grievance should have enjoyed the sanction of one who, like Lord Chatham, was an empire builder, one who proudly wrote, "I am a Briton," and even during the time he sought to retrieve the Pennsylvania colonists' lost natural rights, entertained the ideas of a British imperialist. Franklin little saw that the internal Pennsylvania struggle was to be contagious, that the provincial revolt was motivated partially at least by political theories which were to be given expression _par excellence_ when a discontented minority created the Declaration of Independence. In 1760 Franklin had the satisfaction of witnessing the victory of the Assembly over the Proprietors, although he was not unaware that the right to tax feudal lands was less than that right he had already envisioned--the right to become a royal colony.[i-292] But Franklin's pleas for charter, constitutional, and natural rights may be misleading if one considers his position as suggestive of doctrinaire republicanism, of Paine's "Government is the badge of our lost innocence," or of Shelley's Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower. His political activities assert the rights of the governed against the governor; his writings often indirectly suggest the intemperance of the governed, and the need for something more lasting than mere outer freedom. Like Coleridge, who wrote: [Man] may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within, white-locked Father Abraham harangued: