The Liberal conception of equality as between individuals is extended to the case of Churches, of nations, and of sexes. These classes are indeed not regarded by the Liberal as classes, but simply as associations, for limited purposes, of individuals, who are, in all essential respects, separate and distinct. To confer a privilege upon one Church or nation or sex is simply to confer a privilege upon the individuals who compose it, and whether the privilege is the monopoly of political power or the sole right to take part in a public ceremony, it does in greater or less degree affect the relative social values of the members of the two groups, and places the members of the inferior at the disposition of those of the superior. To give the Established Church the sole right to take part in the coronation of the King is a violation {12} of Liberal principle of the same kind, though not of the same degree, as to exclude Dissenters or Catholics from Parliament, and if men were content to exclude women only from the legal profession, they would be arrogating to themselves a superior value no less clearly than when they refuse to them the right to control their own government. The same general habit of mind is applied to foreign policy. The acknowledgment of the equal worth of individuals within the nation becomes the acknowledgment of the equal worth of nations among themselves. "Nationalism has stood for liberty, not only in the sense that it has resisted tyrannous encroachment, but also in the sense that it has maintained the right of a community to work out its own salvation in its own way. A nation has an individuality, and the doctrine that individuality is an element in well-being is rightly applied to it. The world advances by the free, vigorous growth of divergent types, and is stunted when all the fresh bursting shoots are planed off close to the heavy, solid stem."[4] The interference of one with another, attempts to prescribe the limits or the cause of development, are as obnoxious in international as in intra-national relations. It was in fact in connection with this idea of nationality that the words "Liberal" and "Liberalism" came into use. The first English Liberals were those statesmen who followed Canning in his championship of Greece and the South American Republics, and some of them were very far from being Liberals within the borders of their own State.[5]