Parliament that had admitted Durham and Chester seats upon their petitions for representation. The argument was put forward in Parliament that America ought to have representatives on these grounds too. Richard Jackson supposed that Parliament had a right to tax America, but he much doubted the expediency of the Stamp Act. He said if it was necessary, as ministers claimed, to tax the colonies, the latter should be permitted to elect some part of the Parliament, "otherwise the liberties of America, I do not say will be lost, but will be in danger." The Knox-Burke debates William Knox, an aide of George Grenville, pamphleteer and subsequent Irish Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, received an appointment in 1756 to the American provinces, and after his return to London in 1761, he recommended the creation of a colonial aristocracy and colonial representation in the British Parliament. He was shortly afterwards appointed agent for Georgia and East Florida, a post which he forfeited by writing in favour of the Stamp Act. In his Grenville-backed pamphlet of 1769, The Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies Reviewed, Knox suggested that colonial representatives might have been offered seats in the British Parliament if they had sought such representation. Knox submitted that: Whilst [the radical colonists] exclaim against Parliament for taxing them when they are not represented, they candidly declare they will not have representatives [in Parliament] lest they should be taxed ... The truth ... is that they are determined to get rid of the jurisdiction of Parliament ... and they therefore refuse to send members to that assembly lest they should preclude themselves of [the] plea [that Parliament's] legislative acts ... are done without their consent; which, it must be confessed, holds equally good against all laws, as against taxes ... The colony advocates ... tell us, that by refusing to accept our offer of representatives they ... mean to avoid giving Parliament a pretence for taxing them. Edmund Burke responded to Knox, who had drawn up The Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies Reviewed as well as The Present State of the Nation under the supervision of George Grenville, by opining in his political tract Observations on a Late State of the Nation: NOW comes [Knox's] American representation ... Is not the reader a little astonished at the proposal of an American representation from that quarter [of Grenville's]? It is proposed