The next year [1681] the patent was granted, in consideration of “the merits of the father, and the good purposes of the son, in order to extend the English empire, and to promote useful commodities.” It was provided by fit clauses, that the sovereignty of the king should be preserved; and that acts of parliament, concerning trade and navigation and the customs, be duly observed. Penn was empowered to assemble the freemen, or their delegates, in such form as he should think proper, for raising money for the uses of the colony, and for making useful laws, not contrary to those of England, or the rights of the kingdom. A duplicate of the acts of the assembly was to be transmitted within five year to the king in council, and the acts might be declared void within six months, if not approved. The novel introduction of the clause subjecting the inhabitants of Pennsylvania to taxation by act of parliament, might afford an argument against being so taxed, to all the colonies whose charters contained no such clause. Dr. Franklin being asked, when examined by the house of commons, in the time of the stamp act, “Seeing their is in the Pennsylvania charter, an express reservation of the right of parliament to lay taxes there, how could the assembly assert, that laying a tax on them by the stamp act was an infringement on their rights? answered, “They understand it thus—by the same charter and otherwise they are entitled to all the privileges and liberties of Englishmen. They find in the great charters and the petition and declaration of rights, that one of the privileges of English subjects is, that they are not to be taxed but by their own consent: they have therefore relied upon it, from the first settlement, that the parliament never would or could, by colour of that clause, tax them till it had qualified itself for the exercise of such right, by admitting representatives from the people to be taxed.” You will recollect governor Nicholson’s writing in 1698, “a great many people in all the colonies, especially in those under proprietaries, think that no law of England ought to be binding to them without their own consent: for they foolishly say, they have no representatives sent from themselves to the parliament of England.” [p. 39.] The Pennsylvanians, it may be noted, were not declared by the patent to be English subjects. There was no express stipulation, as had been inserted in all the other colonial patents, “that the Pennsylvanians and their descendants should be considered as subjects born within the realm;” for the lawyers who revised it, considered such declaratious as nugatory, since they were inferred by law.[45] If the right of the English parliament to tax the colonies could also have been inferred by law, why was not the express reservation of that right considered likewise as nugatory.