Therefore, _acquired rights_ may be defined, such good, in the form of benefits or privileges, as results from the performance of duty. Logically, they belong to the class of the essential good called benefits or privileges, with the “_essential difference_” that they are such as result from the performance of duty. Any other result, though in itself of the nature of the essential good, yet, as it conferred no benefit, could not be said to be _our right_. Capital punishment, for example, when in accordance with the Divine will, is in itself of the nature of the essential good; still, it would be an abuse of language to say, in any ordinary case, that it was the right of the criminal to be hung! because for no reason that we can imagine does it confer any benefit or privilege upon the criminal. To be _acquired rights_, therefore, they must not only be of the nature of the good--that is, actual benefits--but this good must result from the performance of duty, and not from the non-performance of duty, as in the example given. The definition corresponds with the language of common sense. All men, in speaking of cases which are supposed to involve the question of _rights_, employ the term in this sense. You say, of a farmer in a given case, that he had no _right_ to an abundant harvest: why? because he neglected his farm: his lands were not properly prepared, and the growing crop was left open to depredations from stock: that is, he neglected his duty; he had no _right_ to the benefit of an abundant harvest. And again, you say to a neighbor, You should have paid a certain sum of money to A., in a given case. He had a _right_ to the money, because he complied with the conditions on which the money was to be paid. _He did his duty_, and therefore had a _right_ to the money. Thus, the neglect of duty negatives _right_ in the one case, and the performance affirms it in the other, according to the common usage of language. Another idea which clearly enters into the common and correct use of this term is that it is reciprocal with _obligation_: that is, wherever there is a right in one person, there is a corresponding obligation, _duty_, upon others. If one man has a _right_ to an estate, others are under obligation, that is, it is their _duty_, to abstain from it. If the letting of it alone be the result of duty on the part of others, the enjoyment of it by him must also result from duty on his part, or the ideas do not coincide: that which was duty in one set of men would not be duty in another, in regard to the same thing, and in correlative circumstances. This would be absurd: therefore, the duty of one set of men to let another alone in the enjoyment of a certain benefit, implies the correlative idea that they enjoy the benefit in virtue of doing their duty. Hence, those benefits which are our rights result to us from the performance of our duty. The points established in this discussion are: