his "Tenure
of Kings and Magistrates" (1649), had taken a similar line: the people had
vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and
preservation. "The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what
is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the
people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains
fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their
natural birthright." Hooker, fifty years earlier (1592-3), in his
"Ecclesiastical Polity," Book I., had affirmed the sovereignty or
legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also
declared for an original social contract, "all public regiment of what kind
soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice,
consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and
behoveful." Hobbes made the social contract a justification for Royal
absolutism, and Locke, with a Whig ideal of constitutional government,
enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and
justified the Revolution of 1688. The writings of Hobbes and Locke have had
a lasting influence, and Locke is really the source of the democratic
stream of the eighteenth century. It rises in Locke to become the torrent
of the French Revolution.

But Huguenots and Jesuits, Hooker and Milton--what influence had their
writings on the mass of English people? None whatever, as far as we can
see. Milton could write of "the power" of "the people" as a "natural
birthright," but the power was plainly in Cromwell's army, and "the people"
had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the
assertion of sovereignty. Lilburne and the Levellers held that democracy
could be set up on the ruins of Charles I.'s Government, and the
sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political
instinct Lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a
democratic franchise. Cromwell rejected all Lilburne's proposals; for him
affairs of State were too serious for experiments in democracy; and
Lilburne himself was cast into prison by the Commonwealth Government.
Lilburne's pamphlets were exceedingly numerous, and his popularity, in
London particularly, enormous. He was the voice of the unrepresented,
powerless citizens in whom the republican theorists saw the centre of
authority. The one effort to persuade the Commonwealth Republic to give
power