In the answers commonly given to this question, the conflict between the Ideal and the Traditional or Customary, which has perplexed us in seeking the definition of Justice, meets us again in an even more complicated form. For not only do some say that obedience is always due to the traditionally legitimate authority in any country, while others maintain that an authority constituted in accordance with certain abstract principles is essentially legitimate, and that a nation has a right to claim that such an authority shall be established, even at the risk of civil strife and bloodshed: but often, too, the authority actually established is not even traditionally legitimate. So that we have to distinguish _three_ claims to authority, each of which may come into conflict with either of the other two: (1) that of the Government held to be ideally or abstractly right, and such as ought to be established: (2) that of the Government _de jure_, according to the constitutional traditions in any given country: and (3) that of the _de facto_ Government. § 2. Let us begin by considering the Ideal. Here I do not propose to consider all views as to the right constitution of supreme authority which speculative thinkers have put forward; but only such as have a _prima facie_ claim to express the Common Sense of mankind on the subject. Of these the most important, and the most widely urged and admitted, is the principle that the Sovereign in any community can only be rightly constituted by the Consent of the Subjects. This, as was noticed in the preceding chapter, is involved in the adoption of Freedom as the ultimate end of political order: if no one originally owes anything to another except non-interference, he clearly ought only to be placed in the relation of Subject to Sovereign by his own consent. And thus, in order to reconcile the original right of Freedom with the actual duty of Law-observance, some supposition of a social compact appears necessary; by means of which Obedience to Law becomes merely a special application of the duty of keeping compacts.