owever, came with no guarantee that it would be followed. That is what happened with all of the taxes that were imposed by Parliament upon the colonies. The colonists defied every act of Parliament and even questioned their right to be in authority over them. This forced the British government to enact even harsher laws where the colonists were concerned. Finally, when these laws were implemented, the colonists sparked a new debate as a last effort to avoid paying their taxes by saying that they were not represented in Parliament. They may not have been directly represented in Parliament, but, as it had been pointed out, no Englishman was directly represented. Men in England may have been able to claim representation, but, in reality, the population of Great Britain was so large and there were so few Parliamentary members that "not one in twenty" people living in England was represented in Parliament [48] . Parliament never asked the colonists to pay a tax that they could not afford. In reality, they were asked to pay less for the items that they had already been purchasing. Had they not been smuggling their good into the colonies and avoiding the tax at every oppertunity, they would have realized this. Everyone in the British Empire had to pay a higher tax than what was asked of the colonies -- even after the various acts. This is not to mention that these taxes were going to be funding the continued protection the the British colonists in America. The Seven Years War, which benefitted the colonists, was very expensive. It was also a burden on the British Crown to pay the bill for ten thousand soldiers that had to be stationed in the colonies. The colonists, in reality, were only asked to pay for their fair share of the protection that benefitted them. Parliament not only had every right as the sovereign power of the British Empire to ask the tax of the colonists, but it was also their duty to keep the Crown from going bankrupt. How su...
