23. This, on the whole, was the form in which the ground of political obligation, the justification of established rights, was presented throughout the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth till the rise of the 'utilitarian' theory of obligation. Special adaptations of it were made by Hobbes and others. In Hobbes, perhaps (of whom more later), may be found an effort to fit an anticipation of the utilitarian theory of political obligation into the received theory which traced political obligation, by means of the supposition of a primitive contract, to an origin in natural right. But in him as much as anyone the language and framework of the theory of compact is retained, even if an alien doctrine may be read between the lines. Of the utilitarian theory of political obligation more shall be said later. It may be presented in a form in which it would scarcely be distinguishable from the doctrine just now stated, the doctrine, viz., that the ground of political obligation, the reason why certain powers should be recognised as belonging to the state and certain other powers as secured by the state to individuals, lies in the fact that these powers are necessary to the fulfilment of man's vocation as a moral being, to an effectual self-devotion to the work of developing the perfect character in himself and others. Utilitarianism proper, however, recognises no vocation of man but the attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain. The only reason why civil rights should be respected--the only justification of them--according to it, would be that more pleasure is attained or pain avoided by the general respect for them; the ground of our consciousness that we ought to respect them, in other words their ultimate sanction, is the fear of what the consequences would be if we did not. This theory and that which I deem true have one negative point in common. They do not seek the ground of actual rights in a prior natural right, but in an end to which the maintenance of the rights contributes. They avoid the mistake of identifying the inquiry into the ultimate justifiability of actual rights with the question whether there is a prior right to the possession of them. The right to the possession of them, if properly so called, would not be a mere power, but a power recognised by a society as one which should exist. This recognition of a power, in some way or other, as that which should be, is always necessary to render it a right. Therefore when we had shown that the rights exercised in political society were derived from prior 'natural' rights, a question would still remain as to the ground of those natural rights. We should have to ask why certain powers were recognised as powers which should be exercised, and thus became these natural rights.