But what about the longstanding Constitutional guarantee of “no taxation without representation”?  The American colonies sent no representatives and could not vote for members of Parliament.  No matter, the Administration replied, neither did women and children.  In fact, whole towns in England sent no representatives to Parliament.  Were they likewise unrepresented and free to disobey statutes?  Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic, the Administration insisted, whether they voted or not were “virtually” represented in Parliament.  Each member of Parliament represented not merely  their narrow constituency who voted them into office, but the people of the realm as a whole.

Americans had not been pushing for actual representation in Parliament:  It was expensive and inefficient to send and maintain representatives.  Only a tiny fraction of Parliament’s attention focused on American affairs. And if America’s representatives in Parliament were to consult their constituents before voting on proposed legislation, months would pass between when notice of the proposed laws reached America from London and notice of the Americans’ reactions or instructions to their representatives arrived in London. Besides, the American representatives would be swamped in Parliament by their small numbers.  Furthermore, America would be unrepresented in the House of Lords.  And finally, representation might be counterproductive.  Once America sent any representatives to Parliament, the colonies would strip themselves of the Constitution claim to their own exclusive power of taxing themselves.  Thus, the argument went, they could not and should not seek actual representatives in Parliament.

But what of the Administration’s claim that Americans, along with all Englishmen and women were already “virtually” represented?  In a widely circulated essay, Daniel Dulaney, a Maryland lawyer, without urging forceful resistance to the Stamp Act itself, destroyed the doctrine of Virtual Representation on which the Stamp Act’s advocates Constitutionally rested it: 

Virtual Representation was absurd, Dulaney insisted.  The “inseparable connection” between non- voters and voters in England which made them all feel the effects of Parliament’s taxes the same way, “acted as their security against oppression”.  But “there is not that intimate and inseparable relation between the electors of Great-Britain, and the inhabitants of the colonies,” Dulaney insisted. “On the contrary, not a single actual elector in England might be immediately affected by a taxation in America.”  America and England wouldn’t feel it equally.  America “might be oppressed in a thousand shapes, without any sympathy, or exciting any alarm” in England.  In fact they might feel it oppositely:  “Acts, oppressive and injurious to the colonies in an extreme degree, might become popular in England, from the promise or expectation, that the very measures which depressed the colonies, would give ease to the inhabitants of Great Britain.”