Yet these resounding phrases doubtless meant something less to Americans of 1764 than one is apt to suppose. The rights of freemen had so often, in the proceedings of colonial assemblies as well as in the newspaper communications of many a Brutus and Cato, been made to depend upon withholding a governor's salary or defining precisely how he should expend a hundred pounds or so, that moderate terms could hardly be trusted to cope with the serious business of parliamentary taxation. "Reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves" was in fact hardly more than a conventional and dignified way of expressing a firm but entirely respectful protest. The truth is, therefore, that while everyone protested in such spirited terms as might occur to him, few men in these early days supposed the new laws would not take effect, and fewer still counseled the right or believed in the practicability of forcible resistance. "We yield obedience to the act granting duties," declared the Massachusetts Assembly. "Let Parliament lay what duties they please on us," said James Otis; "it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them till they be pleased to relieve us." Franklin assured his friends that the passage of the Stamp Act could not have been prevented any more easily than the sun's setting, recommended that they endure the one mischance with the same equanimity with which they faced the other necessity, and even saw certain advantages in the way of self-discipline which might come of it through the practice of a greater frugality. Not yet perceiving the dishonor attaching to the function of distributing stamps, he did his two friends, Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut and John Hughes of Pennsylvania, the service of procuring for them the appointment to the new office; and Richard Henry Lee, as good a patriot as any man and therefore of necessity at some pains later to explain his motives in the matter, applied for the position in Virginia.