in its political life. Therefore the British government tried to argue that the colonists had virtual representation in their interests. In the winter of 1764–65, George Grenville, and his secretary Thomas Whately, utilized the doctrine of 'virtual representation' in an attempt to extend the scope of such unjust arguments to America, and thereby attempt to legitimize the pernicious policies of the Stamp Act. In English history, "no taxation without representation" was an old principle and meant that Parliament had to pass all taxes. At first, the "representation" was held to be one of land, but, by 1700, this had shifted to the notion that, in Parliament, all British subjects had a "virtual representation." "We virtually and implicitly allow the institutions of any government of which we enjoy the benefit and solicit the protection," declared Samuel Johnson in his political pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny. He rejected the plea that the colonists, who had no vote, 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 the only partially complete English bourgeois revolution. The Americans carried through the bourgeois democratic revolution on a scale never before seen in history." Colonial reactions Virtual representation was wholly rejected in the colonies also. The colonial position was that the "virtual" was a cover for political corruption and was irreconcilable with their belief that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. In 1765, the American lawyer and politician James Otis, Jr., responded to Soame Jenyns' The Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies, by the Legislature of Great Britain, Briefly Considered. Otis' own publication was entitled Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists, in a Letter to a Noble Lord. He wrote in it, "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes to the colonists on the cases of Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, who return no members? If those now so