in that manner as much as he can. But he has not a right to three
hundred a-year, though he may happen to be earning it; because society
is not called on to provide that he shall earn that sum. On the
contrary, if he owns ten thousand pounds three per cent. stock, he _has_
a right to three hundred a-year; because society has come under an
obligation to provide him with an income of that amount.

To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society
ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask
why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility. If
that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the
strength of the obligation, nor to account for the peculiar energy of
the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the
sentiment, not a rational only but also an animal element, the thirst
for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its
moral justification, from the extraordinarily important and impressive
kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of
security, to every one's feelings the most vital of all interests.
Nearly all other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed
by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone,
or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly
do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the
whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since
nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to
us, if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever
was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of
all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had, unless the
machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our
notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow creatures to join
in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers
feelings round it so much more intense than those concerned in any of
the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is
often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The
claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity,
and incommensurability with all other considerations, which constitute
the distinction between the feeling of right and wrong and that of
ordinary expediency and inexpediency.