Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/19

Rh agreed to merge themselves in the parliament of Great Britain.” In general, the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 is the point at which commentators center attention on the waxing idea of parliamentary supremacy, and ignore the waning idea of supremacy of law.

But while the dilemma of sovereign Parliament or absolute king is a statement of the constitutional issues of the Great Civil War sufficiently exact to put the war in its right historical perspective, the idea of supreme law did not disappear on November 3, 1640, as one might infer. The Long Parliament itself for a year maintained in its utterances that the law was sovereign; it was only as the interpreter of the law that it claimed sovereignty for itself in 1642. Moreover, from 1645 to 1653 Levellers preached to the nation the need for a sovereign law to bind the Parliament. The Levellers, therefore, as champions of supreme law, assume importance as exponents of the idea that was the necessary counterpart and opposite to the idea of absolute government.

This fact, the author thinks, has importance for both English and American constitutional history. We may not trace adequately the development of any political idea, if we ignore the opposition the idea encounters. As students of the English constitution, we can scarce hope to understand fully how a sovereign parliament came into being, until we understand also why men opposed it. Furthermore, we must remember that very