Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/43

 was that “if the State intrusts this [power] to one man, or few, there may be danger in it; but the Parliament is neither one nor few, it is indeed the State it self.” The facts were against this assertion. Were Parliament “the state it self,” it must represent all the political ideas and aspirations of the individuals who made up the state; and with Royalists everywhere rallying to the king, Parliament’s sayings and actions were but the sayings and actions of a party; at best, the sayings and actions of a government which a great part of the kingdom repudiated.

Parker did not consider that the actual situation militated against his theory. He never tempered his glorification of the nation’s civil authority as an organic body by consideration for the rights or opinions of any of the individuals of whom the nation was composed. In ascribing absolute power to the English people assembled in Parliament, he turned his back on the old common law of England, with its blundering endeavors to secure certain rights to individual Englishmen. Parker’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was in the end to become the doctrine of the English constitution, but not till after it had met stubborn opposition from men who attempted to shelter the rights of the individual from possible encroachments of government—men who, as Parker was writing, were drawing their swords for the Parliament.