Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/128

 son assigned against Parliament’s permitting only licensed preaching is significant; licensed preachers are not the ones willing to go to the parts of the kingdom where they are most needed—where the people by ignorance were seduced to betray their liberties and take up arms for the king. By 1648 the idea that the sole strength of tyranny has been popular ignorance and can be overcome only by popular education, dominates the Leveller program. The friends of liberty must appeal to the reason that is innate in every man; that reason when rightly fostered will enable him to distinguish political good from political evil.

The most interesting feature for our purpose, however, both of England’s Birth-right and of several contemporary pamphlets by Lilburne is the scattered sentences and fragmentary statements that contain the crude material of new constitutional and legal theories. These pamphlets mark successive stages in Lilburne’s constitutional thinking. Thus in August of 1645 his ideas were incoherent and contradictory; but by October he had thought his way to a clear and consistent statement of the English constitution and of the nature of the security it afforded to the rights of individuals.

The title of the August pamphlet was The Copy of a Letter. It was rather incoherent in its legal doctrine, the noteworthy feature being Lilburne’s novel use of Magna Charta and the Petition of Right in his argument against the committee’s right to proceed against him. During the struggle with the king those documents had been cited