Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/30

14 Parliament is today the supreme legislature of the British Empire, but in the political thought of the seventeenth and of earlier centuries, Parliament was less and more than a legislature. Less, because many thinkers would have ascibed the power of legislation, the power of making new laws, to the king; although it was a power that he could exercise only in Parliament. More, because Parliament, though its transcendent function was that of legislation as we understand the term today, was also the king’s greatest council and the king’s highest court. As the latter it had the duty of interpretation that of necessity belongs to any court—the duty of stating and interpreting a rule of law before applying it in the decision of a specific case. True, it is not easy to find the Long Parliament at work which we should today regard as judicial. But its contemporaries spoke of it as a court; and probably they considered such of its enactments as were declaratory of the older law as being decisions of a court rather than acts of a legislature.

The august character of Parliament in its three functions of council, court, and legislature was traced to the fact that it represented the whole kingdom, and was the symbol of the perfect ac-