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 aware of any obstructions that lie in the way of it. While Knox, Grenville and Burke were not necessarily opposed in principle to direct colonial representation in Parliament, Grenville nonetheless conjectured that Parliament retained a constitutional right to virtually represent the colonial subjects. Burke supported the doctrine of virtual representation in Britain. Yet in his Parliamentary speech of 1774, entitled "On American Taxation", Burke responded to the suggestion that America was virtually represented in Parliament by remarking, What! does the electric force of virtual representation more easily pass over the Atlantic than pervade Wales, which lies in your neighborhood? or