Although the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 removed the piece of legislation the colonies found most irritating, it did not resolve the constitutional issue that had risen with act’s passage. In fact, Parliament quickly responded to the arguments the colonists made about its powers. In the Declaratory Act, passed in March 1766—at the same time that the Stamp Act was repealed—Parliament asserted its right to pass legislation affecting the colonies. Prominent Virginian landowner George Mason, in his “Letter to London Merchants,” argued with businessmen in Great Britain who had taken it upon themselves to reprimand the colonists for resisting parliamentary authority. As late as 1768 the London-trained lawyer John Dickinson was restating the colonists’ constitutional position in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. In 1773 Benjamin Franklin recognized how far the relationship between the mother county and her colonies had degraded in his satirical essay “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.”