Of the general conceptions of representation, that which had greatest stress & development in the colonies proceeded from the idea of strict delegation of powers. Its first complete presentation in public discussion occurred in the coursework of the Commonwealth period, when its chief proponents were the Levellers, of the groups of radical Puritans. Although prominent in English life for only a short period, & drawn mainly from the rank & file of the New Model Army, the Levellers left an enduring mark on English & American Political theory. They were feared & loathed by the Presbyterian Parliament, which possessed power through their force of arms, for their fierce, religious democracy did not cease short of castigating King, parliament, or army leaders. The time came when Cromwell, increasingly intolerant of their demands & pressed by a Parliament which increasingly desired the security of monarchy against "anarchists," used martial discipline against their activities in the army, but they had already found time & opportunity to state their case before the English people. The last years of the Commonwealth & the Dictatorship were not of their making, nor was the Restoration friendly toward their ideas; & in England it was not until another century passed that the Radicals took up Leveller ideas of representation. However, their influence was felt by Harrington, Sidney, & Locke. Most strikingly, their ideas found a home in sure of the American colonies where political leaders such as William Penn & Roger William gave them voice.

Already they have perceived indications of kinds of ideas of representation. There is, first, the idea of strict, legal agency which prevailed with respect to Parliament until the fifteenth century in England. Second, there is the idea of virtual representation, which probably had its beginning in the idea of the growth of the state as a type of corporation & which, if not restricted, can serve as well to justify despotism as to characterize an idealistic performance of duty. There is third, the idea of representation as fiction without substance, a concealment of the raw facts of the elite control. Each moves down the years with its impedimenta of strictures & claims.

Therefore, the only true representation is a relationship of delegation, tight control, & prepared recall. "We are your Principals & you our agents," asserts Lilburne to the Presbyterian Parliament which is holding him prisoner in the Tower.

The Levellers had no faith in Kings or Lords, nor significantly, in the House of Commons as then constituted. In the Leveller Manifestoes, collected by Don M. Wolfe, this & lots of of the points to follow are illustrated. The faith of the Levellers lay in the people by the laws of reason & nature. "In nature & reason, there is none above, or over another, against mutual consent & agreement." They believed that man is rational & that the law of reason is inviolable by representative of any sort. The power of Parliament is consequently null against the will of the people.

"Wee are well assured, yet cannot forget, that the reason for our choosing you to be Parliament-men, was to deliver us from all kind of Bondage, & to preserve the Commonwealth in Peace & Happinesse: For effecting whereof, they possessed you with the same Power that was in our selves, to have completed the same; For they might justly have completed it our selves without you, if they had thought it convenient; choosing you (as Persons whom wee thought fitly quallified, & Faithfull), for avoiding some inconveniences."

If this statement is compared with that of Sir Thomas Smith cited historicallyin the past, it is clear that the relation between representatives & represented was construed by Lilburne in a manner more exact, although the relation, by its very precision, lacks realism. He believed, however, that the emphasis on agency must be made in order to prevent usurpation of power. For the first time, English political thinkers were feeling the biting fringe of Parliamentary oligarchy, & they felt that devices must be made in to law if the true representation of the people was to be ensured.

"By naturall birth," wrote Overton in "An Arrow Against All Tyrants," all men are equally & similar borne to like propriety, liberty & freedom... every man by nature being a King, Priest & Prophet in his own natural circuits & compasses."
Out of the laws of nature come the rationality of man & the social compact, made by equal men who are socially inclined & well-disposed towards another. Since reason is the true quality of men, no other qualification for the vote is necessary. The franchise becomes for the first time a natural right, than a right attached to land or to property. The demand for universal manhood suffrage, voiced in the First Agreement of the People, & defended with vigor by Gainsborough in the debates with Breton & Cromwell, was modified to some extent in the Agreement of 1648 by requirement of occupational independency. Probably the later modifications followed assaults against the Levellers for being "subversive" of the social order. But again in the third Agreement of 1649 they find that Parliament is to be chief authority of England & is to consist of hundred representatives "in the choice of whom (according to natural right) all men of the age of &0 years & upwards (not being servants, or receiving alms, or having served the late King in Arms or voluntary Contributions) shall have their voices."

Property was declared to be a natural right, but this was emphasized to defend themselves from accusations of "anarchism" & "lawlessness" & to prevent their being associated with the Diggers, a communistic sect, than to establish their vested interests. In the Petition of September II, 1648, the Levellers demanded of the Commons at & the same time "That you would bound yourselves & all future Parliaments from abolishing Propriety, levelling mens Estates, or making all things common," & "That you would have laid open all late Inclosures of Fens, & other Commons, or have enclosed them only or chiefly to the benefit of the poor." Demands against monopoly, excises, confinement for debt, & so forth, proof that the Levellers were truly the voice of economic liberalism, of little enterprise & the little farmer. Walwyn wrote that he was not a communist & "that he wished only those reforms that would permit every who labored in so plentiful a land as England to earn a comfortable subsistence."

Elections are to be effectively administered to keep away from the corrupt practices which had disfranchised & discommoded so lots of electors historically & made elections in most cases a farce. Details of administration were prescribed.
Parties are regarded as factions fighting over spoils, & there is no conception of the party system which later grew up. Such factionalism is to be avoided by forbidding office-holders to be Members of Parliament. The management of the affairs of state are to be placed in the hands of a "Council of State" which will hold office for the period of the single parliament. The House of Lords, of coursework, is nowhere provided for. No town is to have a public official imposed on it, but will have freedom to elect all of 'its administrative officials.

The second Agreement contains a detailed mathematical subdivision of the nation for the purposes of representation, & delegates are to be selected on the basis of population.
No representative holding a paid office of the state can be eligible to retain his chair, nor may "Lawyers, those vermin & caterpillars \.\. the chief bane of this poor Nation," practice law while sitting as delegates.

It is clear that the Levellers had no purpose of trusting much power to the courts. Their hatred of lawyers & of the complicated ritual of the law is evident in lots of places. They removed the creation of the courts from Parliament, which in itself was to diminish the status of the courts, & then proceeded to lay down a lot of limitations on the supreme authority of Parliament itself. Lots of of these limitations were aimed at specific abuses of the Presbyterian Parliament, that "Conspiracy... of lawless, limitless & unbounded men..."

The third Agreement provides for annual elections of parliament & annual elections of all local officials.Nor may a member of parliament succeed himself. In fact, a kind of recall is recommended whereby selected County Commissioners may listen to an impeachment & bring representatives to trial for excesses of power. Justices of the peace are to be selected & Parliament is not to constitute a court. Furthermore, in view of the Levellers' experience as soldiers, officers are to be selected by the voters of the localities raising the troops. Parish ministers, , are to be popularly selected, &, in at least leaflet, complete toleration of Dissenters & Papists similar was demanded, a concession that neither Milton nor the other Independent leaders would have admitted.

Unhappily for the reason for the Levellers, they were an artificial class which could not organize on any permanent basis outside the ranks of the army. The enclosures had already destroyed a huge number of the yeomen farmers who might have sustained the reformers. The "sturdy beggars," whose interests concerned the Levellers , were in no state to furnish support to a political movement. Thus, when the Levellers were finally repressed within the army itself, their proposals became diffused & cloudy, no longer representing the interests of a specific class. They find their ideas in Harrington, Sidney, & Locke, but greatly modified. For the next clear statement of them, they must wait for some of the American revolutionaries, the late eighteenth-century English Radicals, & the Italian Revolution. They shall refer to their general idea of democracy as "direct democracy," & their idea of representation as "direct representation," keeping in mind that direct democrats usually think that representation is only a device "for avoiding some inconveniences."

James Harrington resembles the Levellers in as far as he advocated in his Oceana (1656) uniform suffrage & apportionment laws, the use of government power to break down the monopoly of the land by a few, rotation in office, & election by secret ballot, to mention a few Leveller principles. On the other hand, his division of the power in society in to the forces of property & intellect made him important to those American Federalists who were seeking to understand the position of property in the state. They appear no to have been satisfied, however, that his election provisions were the way to perpetuate the pre-eminence of property. Furthermore, Harrington was still thinking in medieval terms, of a society of established, albeit equal, orders, with the equality in land as the basis for the "balance" which was to support the state. His city governments were to be based on gilds.

The gild idea, like the landed-interest idea, was destined to fail because of the Industrial Revolution. The late medieval gilds in England were never all-powerful in local affairs. They were tight unions of tradesmen & artisans with powers to set wages, prices, & periods of apprenticeship. In a few cases sure gilds got representation on town councils or given judicial authority to enforce trade customs. But they were always subordinate to the laws of the kingdom & the ordinances of the towns, & usually, their political power came from their character as pressure groups. In Harrington's time, they did not offer a actual threat to unitary authority, as they had been declining in influence for a century. Changed economic conditions than the government (which favored gilds) rendered them impotent.

Locke dropped Harrington's medieval orders & worked in lieu on the imposing new idea of the majority principle. If he was wholly or largely responsible for the Constitutions of the Carolinas (& most agree that he was), his resemblance to Harrington is enhanced, for the estates were prominent in the projected representative system. The constitutions appear to reflect an idea of a religiously tolerant but late-feudal society, with a predisposition to favor landed wealth.

But there is a different Locke & it is well that he did not treat representation in detail. His theory of social contract would involve him in difficulties, for it implies a competency to the majority which cannot be mechanically subordinated to his precious values. Not only can Locke's majority be construed to have a power & scope far beyond that ordinarily ascribed to it, but other ideas of representation, Leveller in spirit, are manifest. Thus he sternly inhibits the arbitrary executive practice of delaying or stopping the assemblage of the legislature according to its whim. Such executive prerogative is a convenience, not an proof of executive superiority over the legislature. Although it would be preferable for the assembly to meet regularly at intervals neither short not long, the occasional need for emergency prorogations might justify project of the calling to the executive.

But Locke's Second Essay on Civil Government (1689) was concerned mainly with the right of revolution (already accomplished) & the right of property (never to be assailed). Both are in the nature of the original human condition & the social contract which binds men together. Having established that no sovereignty is superior to those principles of government, Locke contributed a great deal to the doctrine of consent & to the security of the propertied classes, but tiny to the political method under which ideas of representation are formulated. For to remove from political debate those issues is to cut the heart out of the controversy over representation to an extent very rivaling the work of Hobbes. Representation then consists of the maintenance of government in accord with the basics of human nature -- consent (to be tested only by revolution) & property (to be maintained by parliamentarism). The representative is no over the executor of the power of the collectivity. No over the "joint power of every member of the society" is given up to the legislator.

Locke proposes another function of the executive, which the English legislature found incompatible with its privileges, as did the later American legislature until the Congressional Apportionment Act of 1930. In the face of a lamentable inequality of representation & without legislative action to treatment the condition, the executive may disregard custom in favor of reason & decree a representation. For "whatsoever shall be completed manifestly for the nice of the people, & establishing the government on its true foundations is, & always will be, prerogative."