While petitioning for a crown colony, he found himself in 1765 faced with a larger than provincial interest--Lord Grenville's Stamp Act forced him into the role of one seeking definition of colonial status. Such was his position in his examination (1766) before the House of Commons relative to the repeal of the Stamp Act. Almost brusquely he told his catechizers that even a moderated stamp act could not be enforced "unless compelled by force of arms."[i-301] With a preface asserting that colonials before 1763 were proud to be called Old-England men, he summarized: "The authority of parliament was allowed to be valid in all laws, except such as should lay internal taxes. It was never disputed in laying duties to regulate commerce."[i-302] Parliament, in the colonial view, had no right to lay internal taxes because "we are not represented there." Mr. Merriam observes that in advancing this legal and constitutional issue, the colonists "had in short an antiquated theory as to the position and power of Parliament, and a premature theory of Parliamentary representation."[i-303] Franklin referred to the Pennsylvania colonial charter to prove that all that was asked for was the "privileges and liberties of Englishmen." When the examiners asked whether the colonists appealing to the Magna Charta and constitutional rights of Englishmen could not with equal force "object to the parliament's right of external taxation," Franklin with cautious ambiguity declared: "They never have hitherto."[i-304] Franklin's skill in upholding tenuous, almost "metaphysical," constitutional grievances (grievances, however, which were not upheld by constitutional legalists in England) captivated Edmund Burke's imagination: Franklin appeared to him like a schoolmaster catechizing a pack of unruly schoolboys. Conservative in his omission of any appeal to "natural rights," he was radical in his legalistic distinctions between parliamentary rights to levy certain kinds of taxes. His position in 1766 and for several years following was one of seeking legal definitions of the colonial status. Considering the popular excesses in the colonies, Franklin's view was anything but illiberally radical. Trying to counteract "the general Rage against America, artfully work'd up by the Grenville Faction,"[i-305] fearful that the unthinking rabble in the colonies might demonstrate too lustily against duties and the redcoats,[i-306] Franklin saw, as a result of the constitutional dilemma, the true extent of the fracture: But after all, I doubt People in Government here will never be satisfied without some Revenue from America, nor America ever satisfy'd with their imposing it; so that Disputes will from this Circumstance besides others, be perpetually arising, till there is a consolidating union of the whole.[i-307]