or seventy or ninety million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the language of childishness.  Things do not happen in that in human affairs.  It is not in that way that opinion grows.  It did not grow in that way in any one of the steps that I have mentioned—­in the abolition of religious persecution, or slavery, or judicial torture.  Unless the individual man sees his responsibility for determining what is right and knowing how and why it is right, there will be no progress; there cannot even be a beginning.

We are to an even greater degree an integral part of European Society, and a factor of European Policy, than we were at the time of the Crimean War, when we mainly determined it; and our theories and discussions will act and re-act upon that policy just as did any considerable body of thought, whether French political thought of the eighteenth century, or German religious thought of the sixteenth century, even at a time when the means of producing that reaction, the book, literature, the newspaper, rapid communication, were so immeasurably more primitive and rudimentary than ours.  What we think and say and do affects not merely ourselves, but that whole body politic of Christendom of which we are an integral part.

It is a curious fact that the moral and intellectual interdependence of States preceded by a long period, that material and economic independence which I have tried recently to make clear.  Nothing is more contrary to fact than to suppose that any considerable movement of opinion in Europe can be limited to the frontiers of one nation.  Even at a time when it took half a generation for a thought to travel from one capital to another, a student or thinker in some obscure Italian, Swiss or German village was able to modify policy, to change the face of Europe and of mankind.  Coming nearer to our time, it was the work of the encyclopaedists and earlier political questioners which made the French Revolution; and the effect of that Revolution was not confined to France.  The ideas which animated it re-acted directly upon our Empire, upon the American Colonies, upon the Spanish Colonies, upon Italy, and the formation of United Italy, upon Germany—­the world over.  These miracles, almost too vast and great to conceive, were the outcome of that intangible thing, an idea, an aspiration, an ideal.  And if they could accomplish so much in that day when the popular press and cheap literature and improved communication did not exist, how is it possible to suppose that any great ferment of opinion can be limited to one group in our day, when we have a condition of things in which the declaration of an English Cabinet Minister to-night is read to-morrow morning by every reading German?