It is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people that no taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent, given personally or by their representatives.

From the first draft of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances passed October 19, 1765 by The First Congress of the American Colonies, also known as the Stamp Act Congress; as cited in John Dickinson and the Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1764-1776, David Louis Jacobson, University of California Press (1965), p. 32