Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/53

 government was inalienable. Nevertheless, once a people had covenanted with a king, it was bound to obey him until he became tyrannical. Like Hunton, Rutherford saw the difficulty of finding an interpreter for the covenant between people and king. His conclusion was that the covenant gave a mutual coercive power to king and people—the one to enforce it on the other; accordingly, that the people might know when they were empowered to rise and resist the tyranny of the monarch, the interpretation of the covenant must be left to the law of nature which, so Rutherford said, was easily to be understood by all people. In supposing that the verdict of the people would be unanimous, and a plain application of self-evident laws, Rutherford was somewhat less practical than Hunton.

As far as the actual political situation went, the doctrine of Hunton and Rutherford assigned little more political importance to the people than did the doctrine of Parker. Hunton, indeed, had merely recognized the fact that the individuals comprising the nation had taken the liberty of deciding between king and Parliament. In fact, the act against the dissolution of Parliament without its consent made impossible any expression of the popular will save a military one. Even a new election would have given the opportunity for political self-expression to one class only of the