In the back settlements, where the population was very thin, the inhabitants would often be unable to get stamps without taking a long journey for the purpose.

The scarcity of specie, too, in the country would cause the pressure to be felt with great severity, as, in his opinion, there was not gold and silver enough in the Colonies to pay the stamp-duty for a single year.

In reply to another question, whether the Colonists would be satisfied with a repeal of the Stamp Act without a formal renunciation of the abstract right of Parliament to impose it, he replied that he believed they would be satisfied.

He thought the resolutions of right would give them very little concern, if they were never attempted to be carried into practice.

The Colonies would probably consider themselves in the same situation in that respect as Ireland.
They knew that the English Parliament claimed the same right with regard to Ireland, but that it never exercised it; and they might believe that they would never exercise it in the Colonies any more than in Ireland.
Indeed, they would think that it never could exercise such a right till representatives from the Colonies should be admitted into Parliament, and that whenever an occasion arose to make Parliament regard the taxation of the Colonies as indispensable, representatives would be ordered.
This last question put to the witness, like several others in the course of his examination, had been framed with the express purpose of eliciting an answer to justify the determination on the subject to which Lord Rockingham and his colleagues had come.