Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/45

 of orders of Parliament being against the law. By what was the law established save by acts of Parliament? Any lawyer who presumed to sit in judgment on those acts might as well claim that his power to do so was of divine right. Surely England had not reached the Antipodes, where children corrected their fathers, that inferior courts should prescribe rules to the highest! As for past precedents of parliamentary procedure, the Long Parliament had all the rights enjoyed by its predecessors, of establishing new precedents suitable to the degeneracy of the time.

These writers depicted the subordination of the people to the Parliament as well-nigh absolute. Some of them, it is true, limited the extreme power of Parliament to the existing emergency, but all of them extended it to include rights over the estates of the subjects. The people could not plead rights of property against the Parliament as they could against the king; for they somehow had endowed Parliament with rights which they had always withheld from him. Says the author of A Disclaimer And Answer Of The Commons Of England:

He knows nothing of the nature of Parliaments, that knows not that the House of Commons is absolutely intrusted with our persons and estates, and by our Lawes