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