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covetous." Now it is time for them, and the whole parliament, unanimously and vigorously to do good, to vindicate their former, almost (shall I say deservedly) lost honour and reputation, and to secure their estates to their posterities. Ye have now the hearts and purses of a resolved honest party, that will not only make addresses to you, like the addresses to the single person, but will stand and fall with you in all just things. But if ye turn back from the strait way of justice; if ye seek to make yourselves, families, or relations great, by ruining or burdening your country; if ye make or maintain the lawyers interest, turn aside the needy from judgments, and rob the widow and fatherless, then will ye be forsaken by God, and all just men; then will not your mountains of treasures, nor numbers of lordships, nor fawning, flattering parasites, any ways help you, nor deliver you, sed meliora spero.

SIRS,

A WORD TO THE ARMY.

YE have once more erected the words of Salus Populi, and declare it ought to be Suprema Lex, the good old cause is now cried up. If your words and hearts go together, it is well; it will be the people's profit, your honour and safety; but, if your zeal exceed not Jehu's, it will signify nothing. The nation hath been too long abused and cousened by fair words, so that they begin to say, Who will now not only speak, but do us any good? Who will prove such self-deniers, as to prefer the country's ease before their own honour or profit? This is what is expected from all sorts, and satisfaction cannot be given to the people but by it. It is not now a time to cry out for acts of indemnity, which will unavoidably burden and punish the innocent, and let the guilty go free. Will ye have all the corrupt mercenary creatures of the late tyrant's lust justified, and all their ill-gotten goods secured? Is there no pity, remorse, nor compassion dwelling in you, in tenderness to the undone people? What mean all your glorious declaration's? What mean all your pretences of religion? mean your fasts? Will ye, under pretence of long prayers, devour widows houses? Consider what fast God requireth at your

hands. Isa. Iviii.

What

But if, at last, nothing will divert you from this stream of injustice, give the people, who have long fed and cloathed you, some satisfaction. As ye are willing to excuse the guilty, so pray let the innocent go free. Give the people an act of indemnity, and free them from paying all, or any part of arrears, that remain due to you for your service in the tyrant's usurpation, especially you that are the grandees of the army (who have sufficiently already gotten by the poor soldiery, in putting a necessity on them to sell - their arrears to you for a matter of nought). Think no more of forcing or persuading the parliament, by your proposals (which are not worth -) to gratify a single family and interest, for

doing those things that rather deserve punishment. Have ye so much pity to a particular family, that have a long space lived in pride and voluptuousness, and have unwarrantable boons given so to continue; and is there no dram of compassion left in you to the dying starving nation? O tempora! O mores! Neither alone would I have you to cease from pressing these things aforesaid, but also to be instrumental to remove those grand needless oppressions which lie on the nation. Be you at last instrumental to free your country from the intolerable burden of the needless lawyers, who love none but themselves. Can ye forget that they were, in the late great protectorian parliament, using all means to ordain laws to hang or banish you, and shall they now be protected in ruining the country by you? God forbid. Surely it is sufficient for the people to pay millions yearly to pay the army and navy, and not to pay millions yearly to that oppressing needless generation. I should wonder what spirits do possess you, if you now, at last, after all the conviction that you have declared, should think on nothing but cloathing yourselves in vanity, in raising your families to high estates, in insulting over your brethren the people of the land, who have not bread, nor cloaths to cover their nakedness. It is probable (and less than which I expect not) that there will be many, or some among you, that will passionately disrespect these sins. But, if I am become your enemy for telling you the truth, let it be so: "Me, me, adsum qui feci, in me convertite ferrum;" think not but that many others, as well as myself, will still disrelish self-seeking and oppression in you, as well as they did in the king, protector, &c. Let England never cease to cry out with the poet, "Rara fides probitasque viris qui castra sequuntur."

A WORD TO THE LAWYERS.

Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity, ye have eaten the fruit of lyes, Hosea x. 13. The spoil of the poor and fatherless is in your houses; ye are weighed in the balance of justice, ye are found as light as chaff; there is a wind risen up, that will blow your interest into the land of oblivion; all the mischiefs and evils that ye have done in secret, are now discovered on the house-top. The cries of the wronged and oppressed, the lamenta. tions of the widows, fatherless, and orphans, God hath heard. Your wickedness is now, like the Amorites, at the height; the sword of justice is ready to cut it down; the decree is passed against your legal robberies; strive, therefore, now to learn peace and patience, and an honester calling; this will be your benefit and content: but, if ye will resist, and gainsay, know this, that assuredly ye will perish in the attempt.

-36

THE LEVELLER;

OR,

THE PRINCIPLES AND MAXIMS CONCERNING

GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION,

WHICH ARE ASSERTED BY THOSE THAT ARE COMMONLY CALLED

LEVELLERS.

London: Printed for Thomas Brewster, at the Three Bibles, at the west end of St. Paul's, 1659, Quarto, containing sixteen pages.

WHEN the sect of the christians first arose, this tyrants

wrapped them in beasts skins, to provoke the wild beasts to rend them in pieces; and, when Christ their Lord descended to earth, the priests and pharisees, finding his doctrine and holiness against their interest, cast upon him all the dirt of blasphemy, drunkenness, and confederacy with the worst of sinners; and, to make sure of his life, they rendered him an enemy to government, and told Pilate that he was no friend to Cæsar if he let him go. It hath been the common practice of all tyrants, to cover the face of honesty with the mask of scandal and reproach, lest the people should be enamoured with its beauty. It is a master-piece in their politicks, to persuade the people that their best friends are their worst enemies, and that whosoever asserts their rights and liberties, is factious and seditious, and a disturber of their peace. Did not the Gracchi, in Rome, by such policy, perish by the people's hands, whose liberties they sought to vindicate? And do not some Englishmen now suffer deeply upon the same account, from the people's hands, for whose sakes they have prodigally hazarded their estates and lives? Are not some lovers of their country de. famed, and esteemed prodigious monsters, being branded with the name of levellers, whilst those, that reproach and hate them, neither know their principles or opinions concerning government, nor the good they intend to their very enemies? Those that have designed to prey upon the people's estates and liberties, have put the frightful vizard of levelling upon those men's faces; and most poople are aghast at them, like children at raw-head and bloody-bones,

and dare not ask who they are, or peep under their vizard, to see their true faces, principles, and designs. Doubtless, if the people durst but look behind them upon the bugbear from which they fly, they would be ashamed of their own childish fear of the levellers' designs, to make all men's estates to be equal, and to divide the land by telling noses. They would easily discern (if they durst consider it) that no number of men out of Bedlam could resolve upon a thing so impossible, that every hour would alter by the birth of some child, if it were possible once to make out equal shares; nor upon a thing so brutish and destructive to all ingenuity and industry, as to put the idle useless drone into as good condition as the laborious useful bee. Neither could the people think that any number of men, fit to be feared, rather than scorned and pitied, could gain by levelling estates, for they can never have power and interest enough to disquiet the nation, unless their estates be much greater than they can be possible upon an equal division; and, surely, it is a bugbear fit for none but children, to fear any man's designs, to reduce their own estates to little better than nothing; for so it would be, if all the land were distributed like a three-penny dole.

But to satisfy such as desire to know what they are, who are now, for distinction sake, though formerly by their enemies scandalously called levellers, and what their designs are; I shall tell you their fundamental doctrines or maxims concerning our govern. ment, and from thence you may make a true judgment of all their plots, and either fear them, or favour them accordingly.

I. First, they assert it as fundamental, that the government of England ought to be by laws, and not by men. They say, the laws ought to be the protectors and preservers, under God, of all our persons and estates, and that every man may challenge that protection as his right, without a ticket from a major-general, and live under that protection, and safely, without fear of a red coat, or a pursuivant from Whitehall. They say, that Englishmen ought to fear nothing but God, and the breach of the laws, not to depend upon the will of a court and their council for the security of themselves and their estates. They say, the laws ought to judge of all offences and offenders, and all penalties and punishments to be inflicted upon criminals; and that the pleasure of his highness, or his council, ought not to make whom they please offenders, and punish and imprison whom they please, and during their pleasure.

They say also, that the laws ought to decide all controversies, and repair every man's injuries, and that the rod of the people's supreme judicature ought to be over the magistrates, to prevent their corruption, or turning aside from the laws; but that the magistrates for executing the laws should not hold their offices at the pleasure of a king, or protector, lest the fear of displeasing him perverts justice. In their opinions, it is highly criminal that a king, or protector, or court, should presume to interpose by

letters, threats, or promises, to obstruct the due course of the -laws, or countenance and abet, or discountenance and brow-beat any man's cause whatsoever. In fine, they say the laws that are incapable of partiality, interest, or passion, ought so to govern, as no man should be subject to the crooked will, or corrupt affections, of any man.

II. The levellers second maxim or principle about governmentis, that all the laws, levies of monies, war, and peace, ought to be made by the people's deputies in parliament, to be chosen by them successively at certain periods of time, and that no counciltable, orders, or ordinances, or court-proclamations, to bind the people's persons or estates. It is the first principle of a people's liberty, that they shall not be bound but by their own consent; and this our ancestors left to England as its undoubted right, that no laws to bind our persons or estates could be imposed upon us against our wills; and they challenged it as their native right, not to be controuled in making such laws as concerned their common right and interests, as may appear by the parliaments records in the time of Edward the Second, and Richard the Second. The levellers say, that those, whose interests are in all things one with the whole people's, are the only proper uninterested judges of what laws are most fit to preserve and provide for that common interest. Such are the people in parliament rightly constituted and methodised, and they may be depended upon to provide remedies. for the people's grievances, because they themselves are sharers in every common grievance, and they will be naturally led to study the common good, because they shall share in it. But, if a monarch's pleasure should controul the people's deputies in their parliaments, the laws must be fitted for the interest of the monarch and his family, to keep him in a condition to overtop the people, not for the common and equal good of the whole nation; and then the monarch's fears on the one hand, lest the people should be able to diminish his greatness, or that he should hold his greatness at their mercy; and the people's fears on the other hand, lest the monarch should be able to make them slaves, and they come to hold their estates and lives at his mercy. These, I say, would set two opposite interests always at contention, in the composing of laws; and the wisdom and industry of the people's deputies, that should be spent in contriving the advancement of the people's common good in the laws, would be taken up, endeavouring to defend and preserve the people's interests against the monarch's: therefore, say the levellers, it is equal, necessary, and of natural right, that the people by their deputies should chuse their own laws. Yet they conceive it would be of much greater good to our country, if our parliaments were moulded into a better form, and some deputies were chosen by the people, only to give their consent or dissent unto laws proposed; and other deputies were chosen for senators, that should consult and debate of the necessity and conveniency of all laws, levies of monies, war, and peace, and then propose all to the great assembly of the people's deputies, to re

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