and resolutions were passed by the Assemblies of the different States to
convene a General Congress at New York in the autumn, to organize a
resistance to the tax, and to take the general state of affairs into
consideration.

Before, however, that time came, a series of events having no connection
with these transactions had led to a change of ministry in England, and
the new cabinet was less inclined to carry matters with a high hand.
Indeed, even the boldest statesman could hardly have learned the state
of feeling which had been excited in America without apprehension, and
those who had the chief weight in the new administration were not men to
imperil the state by an insistance on abstract theories of right and
prerogative. Accordingly, when, after Lord Rockingham had become
Prime-minister, Parliament met in December, 1765, the royal speech
recommended the state of affairs in America to the consideration of
Parliament (a recommendation which manifestly implied a disposition on
the part of the King's advisers to induce the House of Commons to
retrace its steps), papers were laid before Parliament, and witnesses
from America were examined, and among them a man who had already won a
high reputation by his scientific acquirements, but who had not been
previously prominent as a politician, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. He had come
over to England as agent for Pennsylvania, and his examination, as
preserved in the "Parliamentary History," may be taken as a complete
statement of the matter in dispute from the American point of view, and
of the justification which the Colonists conceived themselves to have
for refusing to submit to pay such a tax as had now been imposed upon
them. At a later day he was one of the most zealous, as he was probably
one of the earliest, advocates of separation from England; but as yet
neither his language nor his actions afforded any trace of such a
feeling.