The great controversy opened with the pretension of Parliament to tax the Colonies, first disclosed to Benjamin Franklin as early as 1754. It was at the time a profound secret; but the patriot philosopher, whose rare intelligence embraced the natural laws of government not less than those of science, in a few masterly sentences exposed the injustice of taxation without representation.[85] For a moment the Ministry shrank back; but at last, when the power of France had been humbled, and the Colonies were no longer needed as allies in war, George Grenville, blind to principle and only seeing an increase of revenue, renewed the irrational claim. The Colonies were to be taxed by the Parliament in which they had no representation. Two millions and a half of people--for such was the population then--were to pay taxes without voice in determining them. The men of that day listened to the tidings with dismay. In this ministerial outrage they saw the overthrow of their liberties, whether founded on natural rights or on the rights of British subjects. In their conclusions they were confirmed by two names of authority in British history, Algernon Sidney and John Locke, each of whom solemnly asserted the liberties now in danger. One had borne his testimony on the scaffold, the other in exile. Sidney, in his Discourses on Government, did not hesitate to say, that “God leaves to man the choice of forms in government,”--and then again, that “all just magistratical power is from the people.”[86] Such words were calculated to strengthen the sentiment of human freedom. But it was Locke who gave formal expression to the very principles now assailed. In a famous passage of his work on Civil Government, inspired and tempered by his exile in Holland, this eminent Englishman bore his testimony. “It is true governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i. e. the consent of the majority, _giving it either by themselves or their representatives chosen by them_; for, if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own authority _and without such consent of the people_, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property and subverts the end of government; for what property have I in that which another may by right take, when he pleases, to himself?”[87] Here is a plain enunciation of two capital truths: first, that all political society stands only on the consent of the governed; and, secondly, that taxation without representation is an invasion of fundamental right. It was these truths that our fathers embraced in the controversy before them; and these same truths, happily characterized by Hallam as “fertile of great revolutions and perhaps pregnant with more,”[88] are as fertile and as pregnant now as then.