The document thus printed did not indeed include the famous fifth resolution upon which the debate in the House of Burgesses was "most bloody" and which had been there adopted by a single vote and afterwards erased from the record; but it included two others much stronger than that eminently treasonable one: Resolved, That his Majesty's Liege people, the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws and ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid. Resolved, That any person who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons, other than the General Assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his Majesty's colony. These resolutions, which Governor Fauquier had not seen, and which were perhaps never debated in the House of Burgesses, were now circulated far and wide as part of the mature decision of the Virginia Assembly. On the 14th of September, Messrs. Randolph, Wythe, and Nicholas were appointed a committee to apprise the Assembly's agent "of a spurious copy of the resolves of the last Assembly ... being dispersed and printed in the News Papers and to send him a true copy of the votes on that occasion." In those days of slow and difficult communication, the truth, three months late, could not easily overtake the falsehood or ever effectively replace it. In later years, when it was thought an honor to have begun the Revolution, many men denied the decisive effect of the Virginia Resolutions in convincing the colonists that the Stamp Act might be successfully resisted. But contemporaries were agreed in according them that glory or that infamy. "Two or three months ago," said Governor Bernard, "I thought that this people would submit to the Stamp Act. Murmurs were indeed continually heard, but they seemed to be such as would die away. The publishing the Virginia Resolutions proved an alarm-bell to the disaffected." We read the resolutions, said Jonathan Sewell, "with wonder. They savored of independence; they flattered the human passions; the reasoning was specious; we wished it conclusive. The transition to believing it so was easy, and we, almost all America, followed their example in resolving that the Parliament had no such right." And the good patriot John Adams, who afterwards attributed the honor to James Otis, said in 1776 that the "author of the first Virginia Resolutions against the Stamp Act ... will have the glory with posterity of beginning ... this great Revolution." ¹