Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/58

 Parliament’s course was leading the nation into democracy—using a word that ordinarily connoted what anarchy does today. Such attempts to arouse class feeling were probably not unfruitful. Undoubtedly the insinuations stuck in men’s minds and in 1645 and 1646 induced the Levellers and their opponents the more readily to put the worst interpretation on each other’s motives.

In fact the political thinking and political practice of 1640–1645 partly determined the course of the Leveller movement. Those years developed an irritating condition of affairs, and suggested a train of argument for attacking it. Parliament’s members had assiduously lectured the kingdom on the existence of fundamental laws and the heinousness of endeavoring to abrogate or evade them. Then, by methods of indirection similar to those it had condemned, Parliament had extended its right of interpreting the fundamental laws till it had interpreted them into nullity. To justify Parliament’s action, its supporters had stated a theory of parliamentary absolutism too unblushing for even Parliament to adopt in full. They had based their theory on the postulate that government derived its authority from its compact with