Colonial lawyers accepted one kind of parliamentary tax in theory but called the other new and debatable. Which line divided them?

1. The preamble to the Sugar Act let the colonists put their discontent on constitutional ground. 2. Parliament had long claimed the power to tax colonial goods in order to regulate trade. 3. That claim had been accepted in theory, even if it was not always accepted in practice. 4. The Revenue Act of 1764 instead claimed a power to tax for improving the revenue of the Kingdom. 5. Taxing for revenue was new, and therefore open to argument in a way that trade regulation was not. 6. So the line runs between regulating trade and raising revenue, not between imports and exports. 7. Wartime and peacetime made no part of the argument, since the objection was to the purpose of the tax. _Source: An Outline of American History (U.S. Information Agency, 1990, public domain), section TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION AT ISSUE_