Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/47

 and the rights that under it the Parliament enjoyed.

Henry Parker’s theory, while already stated, may here be summed up briefly. The people for their preservation had set over themselves a ruler empowered to provide for their security according to the law. In case he were derelict to his duty, the kingdom could provide for its security in Parliament. If a certain Discourse betweene A Resolved and a Doubtfull Englishman be Parker’s—and certainly it carries to a logical conclusion the reasoning of his signed works—he was inclined to handle the whole question of compact between king and people in an extremely off-hand way. To argue from the law of salus populi—we are here summing up the discourse between the two Englishmen—the remote predecessors of seventeenth-century Parliaments in setting up a king as chief magistrate, and supplying him (if they had done so) with a veto power, had acted for the safety of the people. Certainly they could not have intended that the form of government they had established should work the nation’s ruin. Nor could the fact that they had constituted a certain form of government deprive their descendants of the right to alter anything in it that they found amiss. Accordingly, to Parker’s mind, the Houses of Parliament whenever they thought it necessary were free to abrogate the ancestral compact with the king, and to abolish kingship.