The epithets of parent and child have been so long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, that ... we rarely see anything from your side of the water free from the authoritative style of a master to a schoolboy:
"We have with infinite difficulty and fatigue got you excused this one time; pray be a good boy for the future, do what your papa and mama bid you, and hasten to return them your most grateful acknowledgements for condescending to let you keep what is your own ... and if you should at any time hereafter happen to transgress, your friends will all beg for you and be security for your good behaviour; but if your are a naughty boy,... then everybody will hate you, and say you are a graceless and undutiful child; your parents and masters will be obliged to whip you severely...."[23]
[23] Robert A. Rutland, ed., Papers of George Mason, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), I, 65-73.
One other Virginian did not rest until he had challenged the notion, much discussed in parliament by commons member Soame Jenyns, that the colonists, like all British citizens, were "virtually" represented in parliament. To Richard Bland nothing could be more vital to the rights of British subjects than to be represented "directly" by those whom they knew and whom they chose to represent them. In March 1766 he published his magnificent defense of Virginia rights, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies. He would not concede to parliament the notion that the colonies and colonists were represented "virtually" in that body just as the nine out of ten Englishmen were who did not have the vote, or because members of commons were elected from districts in which they did not live or own property, or because nearly every profession and "interest", be it merchant, farmer, west Indian planter, physicians, soldier, clergy, and even a few Americans sat in parliament. The Inquiry was a hard-hitting defense of "direct representation". Interlaced with citations to the ancient charters of Virginia were terms of fury--"detestable Thought", "Ungenerous Insinuation", "despicable Opinion", "slavery", "oppression", terms which suggest the level to which rhetoric had risen even for as rational a man as the moderate burgess from Prince George County, now grown "tough as whitleather" with "something of the look of musty old Parchments which he handleth and studieth much". The Inquiry was widely read in Virginia and England and its statement on "direct representation" became the standard American defense against "virtual representation" and any half-way measure which would have given the colonies a few seats in parliament in the manner of Scotland or Wales.