[4] Daniel Dulany, a Province of Maryland politician and lawyer trained in the Middle Temple in London, was unsettled by the argument that the colonists were virtually represented in Parliament.

"[5]: 167  Yet lacking this "intimate and inseparable relation" with electors in Great Britain, the colonists' interests were not protected in this manner, Dulany wrote.

[5]: 167 Dulany further argued that members of Parliament, though formally free to act according to their conscience, nevertheless faced pressure to follow the wishes of their constituents or else lose their mandates.

Many of his contemporaries, including British parliamentarian Thomas Whately and Massachusetts politician James Otis, Jr., similarly criticized the concept and its application to the colonies.

[4][5]: 212  This distinction between regulation and revenue-raising anticipated John Dickinson's legal argument in his influential Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published from 1767 to 1768.

[4] In the judgment of historians Edmund and Helen Morgan, "Its articulation and justification of [his countrymen's] own instinctive view of colonial rights delighted them.