eir taxes. This particular test became a challenge, and in 1767 Charles Townshend, a man seeking popularity, took that challenge. Townshend was a man that had been around in Parliament to vote for the Stamp Act when it was popular, and then voted to repeal it when doing so was the popular thing [24]. No man in Parliament had been able to come up with a plan that would convince the colonists to pay their taxes since Parliament started paying attention to them after the Seven Years War. Townshend decided that the best way to increase his popularity was to get the American colonists to obey Parliament and pay their taxes peacefully. In order to do this, he took into consideration the speech that Franklin had delivered several years earlier. Franklin had said that internal taxes were too cumbersome, and that the people in the colonies would always oppose an internal tax. An external tax, however, would be treated with a bit more respect in the colonies -- or at least, that is what Parliament was led to believe. Townshend wanted to be the man who extracted the desired taxes from the colonies, so he devised a plan which would involve an external tax. "Charles Townshend . . . gambled an empire for the sake of popularity. . . ." He decided that in "expressing their aversion to the internal taxes such as the Stamp Act, [the Americans] had admitted the validity of Britain's right to impose duties"[25] . The Townshend Acts first involved the old Navigation Laws. Burke did not oppose these laws, as he had the others introduced by Townshend, because he did not feel that the colonies would protest against the Navigation Laws. They were "traditional commercial regulations. They were the corner stone of British colonial policy; they protected and promoted imperial commerce, to the benefit of mother country and colonies alike. Therefore, Burke argued that the solution of the American controversy was easy. Let Britain . . . 'be content to bind America by...
