Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/158

 hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no mans; I may be but an Individuall, enjoy my selfe, and my selfe propriety, and may write my selfe no more then my selfe”

This conception of the worth and importance of the individual influences the Leveller doctrine of compact. The Levellers indeed are the first of the thinkers of the Puritan Revolution who state clearly the theory of the social compact. Earlier definitions of compact were framed to demonstrate the sovereignty of a nation that had made a grudging dole of power to a monarchy it had created. The former authors who used this concept made of man’s entrance into civil society a logical commonplace, fit only to introduce in a sentence or two the compact between people and king. It is left for the Levellers to use the doctrine of compact to emphasize the fact that the individual has certain rights pertaining to him as a man. This principle leads them to conclude that at the time when individual persons coalesced into a sovereign body politic, each person reserved certain rights which Nature and Nature’s God taught him were inalienable—so vital to his safety that if he surrendered them he violated the instinct of self-preservation and committed murder on his own body. In 1647 a Presbyterian author undertakes to define the difference between the two theories of compact. The defenders of the Parliament against the king understood the law of nature to refer to the right enjoyed by heads of families in a patriarchal society