"Granting the time may come, which we hope is far off, when the British Parliament shall think fit to oblige the North Americans, not only to maintain civil government among themselves, for this they have already done, but to support an army to protect them, can it be possible, that the duties to be imposed and the taxes to be levied shall be assessed without the voice or consent of one American in Parliament? If we are not represented, we are slaves." This document was one of the few American papers which was read and criticized in the British Parliament. The merits of Mr. Otis's pamphlet were actually debated in the House of Lords by Lord Littleton and Lord Mansfield. The latter in the course of his remarks said: "Otis is a man of consequence among the people there. They have chosen him for one of their deputies at the Congress, and general meeting from the respective governments. It is said the man is mad. What then? One madman often makes many. Massaniello was mad, nobody doubts; yet for all that, he overturned the government of Naples. Madness is catching in all popular assemblies, and upon all popular matters. The book is full of wildness. I never read it till a few days ago, for I seldom look into such things." It was in the course of this pamphlet that the Mr. Otis spoke so strongly on taxation and representation. "The very act of taxing," said he, "exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights; and, if continued seems to be, in effect, an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man's property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure, without his consent?"[2] In this was the germ of the stern resistance offered by the Americans to the Stamp Act. No man in the colonies did so much to confute the principles on which the Stamp Act rested as did James Otis. When the General Assembly of Massachusetts met in May of 1765, Governor Bernard urged in his address the duty of submission to Parliament as to the "conservators of liberty." It was this recommendation which being referred to a Committee, of which Otis was a member, led to the adoption of a resolution for the holding of a Colonial Congress in New York. Nine colonies accepted the invitation of Massachusetts, and James Otis headed the delegation of three members chosen to represent the mother colony in that prophetic body. The story of the contest of the Americans with the home government on the subject of the Stamp Act is well known. The controversy resulted on the 18th of March, 1766, in the repeal of the Act by Parliament. But the repeal was accompanied with a salvo to British obduracy in the form of a declaration that Parliament had "the right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever."