view, or they would hardly assert their right to enjoy the pleasure of offering an insult.”  He was answered by Lord Northington (the Chancellor) and by Lord Mansfield (the Chief-justice), both of whom supported the motion to repeal the tax, but who also agreed in denying the soundness of his doctrine that, as far as the power was concerned, there was any distinction between a law to tax and a law for any other purpose; and Lord Mansfield farther denied the validity of the argument which it had been attempted to found on the circumstance that the Colonies were not represented in Parliament, propounding, on the contrary, what Lord Campbell calls “his doctrine of virtual representation.”  “There can,” said he, “be no doubt but that the inhabitants of the Colonies are represented in Parliament, as the greatest part of the people of England are represented, among nine millions of whom there are eight who have no votes in electing members of Parliament.  Every objection, therefore, to the dependency of the Colonies upon Parliament which arises upon the ground of representation goes to the whole present constitution of Great Britain....  For what purpose, then, are arguments drawn from a distinction in which there is no real difference of a virtual and an actual representation?  A member of Parliament chosen for any borough represents not only the constituents and inhabitants of that particular place, but he represents the inhabitants of every other borough in Great Britain.  He represents the City of London and all the other Commons of the land, and the inhabitants of all the colonies and dominions of Great Britain, and is in duty and conscience bound to take care of their interests.”

Lord Mansfield’s doctrine of a virtual representation of the Colonies must be admitted to be overstrained.  The analogy between the case of colonists in a country from no part of which representatives are sent to Parliament, and that of a borough or county where some classes of the population which may, in a sense, be regarded as spokesmen or agents of the rest form a constituency and return members, must be allowed to fail; yet the last sentences of this extract are worth preserving, as laying down the important constitutional principle, subsequently expanded and enforced with irresistible learning and power of argument by Burke, that a member of the House of Commons is not a delegate, bound, under all circumstances, to follow the opinions or submit to the dictation of his constituents, but that from the moment of his election he is a councillor of the whole kingdom, bound to exercise an independent judgment for the interests of the whole people, rather than to guide himself by the capricious or partial judgments of a small section of it.  But in its more immediate objects—­that of establishing the two principles, that the constitution knows of no limitation to the authority of Parliament, and of no distinction between the power of taxation and that of any other kind of legislation—­Lord Mansfield’s speech is now universally admitted to have been unanswerable.[38]