This, I believe, is not alone the root of persecution, but it serves to explain as nothing else can its persistence in social life and the fact of its having became almost a general mental characteristic. To realize this one need only bear in mind the overpowering part played by religious conceptions in early communities. There is nothing done that is not more or less under the assumed control of supernatural agencies. Fear is the dominant emotion in relation to the gods, and experience daily proves that there is nothing that can make men so brutal and so callous to the sufferings of others as can religious belief. And while there has all along been a growing liberation of the mind from the control of religion, the process has been so slow that this particular product of religious rule has had time to root itself very deeply in human nature. And it is in accordance with all that we know of the order of development that the special qualities engendered by a particular set of conditions should persist long after the conditions themselves have passed away. The conditions that co-operate in the final breaking down of the conviction of the morality of persecution are many and various. Primarily, there is the change from the social state in which the conception of corporate responsibility is dominant to one in which there is a more or less clearly marked line between what concerns the individual alone and what concerns society as a whole. This is illustrated in the growth from what Spencer called the military type of society to an industrial one. In the case of a militant type of society, to which the religious organization is so closely affiliated, a State is more self contained, and the governing principle is, to use a generalization of Sir Henry Maine's, status rather than contract. With the growth of commerce and industrialism there is developed a greater amount of individual initiative, a growing consideration for personal responsibility, and also the development of a sense of interdependence between societies. And the social developments that go on teach people, even though the lesson may be unconsciously learned, to value each other in terms of social utility rather than in terms of belief in expressed dogmas. They are brought daily into contact with men of widely differing forms of opinion; they find themselves working in the same movements, and participating in the same triumphs or sharing the same defeats. Insensibly the standard of judgment alters; the strength of the purely social feelings overpowers the consciousness of theological differences, and thus serves to weaken the frame of mind from which persecution springs.