the colonists did not adhere to them. Edmund Burke reminded everyone in Parliament that "a great black book and a great many red coats [would] never be able to govern [America]"[46] . Truer words may never have been spoken in Parliament. The laws may have been enacted by the men in that room, but the military was what England depended upon to defend and uphold her policies in America. Burke and Pitt and their supporters could see that England was not going to be able to force America back into obedience, while others maintained that they "either [had] the right to tax the colonies or [they] did not . . ."[47] . The number of men in Parliament who sympathized with the situation faced by people in America was greatly diminished by 1774. It was certainly the right of Parliament to tax the colonies for their debt incurred by the Seven Years War, but none of the policies were doing any good. Parliament had attempted to retrieve the money that the colonists owed for the protection they had received during the war and the stationing of the troops there ever since. Their method for regaining the funds that had been spent on America's behalf was always a tax of some sort or another. When Lord Grenville's internal taxes were not welcome in the colonies, they were repealed. In their place, Charles Townshend attempted to collect payments for that same debt though an external tax, which Benjamin Franklin had pointed out to Parliament as an alternative to the troublesome taxes that were collected at the store. This set of taxes failed as well, and Parliament began to realize that the colonists simply had no intention or desire whatsoever to pay any sort of tax to cover the cost of their protection. While William Pitt and Edmund Burke supported the position of the colonists' refusal to pay these taxes, they maintained that Parliament did have the right to impose any taxes as well as other laws upon the colonists. The right to impose a law or a tax, h...
