No taxation without representation the House of Commons must include colonial representatives when it voted on colonial matters, or operate by using the consent of the colonial Assemblies. The Americans rejected the Stamp Act of 1765 brought in by British Prime Minister George Grenville, and violently rejected the remaining tax on tea imports, under the Tea Act passed in May 1773, at the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. The Parliament considered this an illegal act because they believed it undermined the authority of the Crown-in-Parliament. When the British then used the military to enforce laws that the colonists believed Parliament had passed
No taxation without representation were unrepresented. "They are represented," he said, "by the same virtual representation as the greater part of England." However, the tradition of greater democracy amongst Americans gave impetus to the well-founded charge, voiced by Britons and colonists alike, that virtual representation was "sophistry" and "a mere Cob-web, spread to catch the unwary, and intangle ["sic"] the weak." The colonial insistence on direct representation as opposed to virtual representation has thus been seen by later commentators to have "usher[ed] in a profound political and social revolution, which rooted out most of the remaining traces of monarchic rule and feudalism inherited from