His mission, then, was up-hill work.  The Penns stood upon their prerogatives, and the Lords of the Committee for Plantations were unfriendly or dilatory.  It was nearly three years before they gave their decision, and this was adverse to the Pennsylvania Assembly.  The Privy Council, however, to whom the persistent agent appealed, composed of the great dignitaries of the realm, decided that the proprietary estates of the Penns should contribute their proportion of the public revenue.  On this decision, Franklin, feeling that he had accomplished all that was possible, returned home in 1762, little more than a year after the accession of George III.  Through the kindness of Lord Bute, the king’s favorite, Franklin also secured the appointment of his son to the government of New Jersey.  This appointment created some scandal, and the Penns rolled up their eyes, not at the nepotism of Franklin, but because he had procured the advancement of his illegitimate son.

Franklin, during his absence of more than five years, had been regularly re-elected a member of the Assembly, and he was received on his return with every possible public and private attention.  He had hoped now for leisure to pursue his scientific investigations, and had accordingly taken a new and larger house.  But before long new political troubles arose between the governor of Pennsylvania and the legislature, and what was still more ominous, troubles in New England respecting the taxation of the Colonies by the British government, at the head of which was Grenville, an able man but not far-sighted, who in March, 1764, announced his intention of introducing into Parliament the bill known as the Stamp Act.

To this famous bill there was not great opposition, since a large majority of the House of Commons believed in the right of taxing the Colonies.  Lord Camden, a great lawyer, took different views.  Burke and Pitt admitted the right of taxation, but thought its enforcement inexpedient, as likely to alienate the Colonies and make them enemies instead of loyal subjects.

At this crisis appeared in America a group of orators who at once aroused and intensified the prevailing discontents by their inflammatory speeches, in much the same manner that Wendell Phillips and Wm. Lloyd Garrison, seventy years later, aroused public sentiment in reference to slavery.  James Otis, the lawyer from Barnstable on the shores of Cape Cod, who had opposed the Writs of Assistance, “led the van of these patriots,—­an impassioned orator, incapable of cold calculation, now foaming with rage, and then desponding, not steadfast in conduct, yet by flashes of sagacity lighting the people along their perilous ways, combining legal learning with speculative opinion.”  He eloquently maintained that “there is no foundation for distinction between external and internal taxes; that the imposition of taxes in the Colonies whether on trade, on land, or houses, or floating property, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the Colonists as British subjects or as men, and that Acts of Parliament against the fundamental principles of the British Constitution are void.”