  Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, less gifted politicians had not devised. Burke's position was altogether subtler than the implied tautology of a minister's claim that ‘to say we have a right to tax America and are never to exercise that right is ridiculous’ (Sir Edward Thurlow, quoted in Gore-Brown 1953, 85), and of another politician's despairing sense that ‘we must either insist upon their submission to the authority of the Legislature or give them up entirely to their own discretion.’  .[9]  These pundits, by failing to conceive a sufficiently complex idea of sovereignty and the sovereign's right to tax, failed also to see that sovereignty did not imply an unpleasant choice between abrogating this right by disuse or applying it by force.