168. This is equally true in regard to those causes of conflict which are loosely called 'religious.' These do not arise out of any differences between the convictions of different people in regard to the nature of God or their relations to Him, or the right way of worshipping Him. They arise either out of some aggression upon the religious freedom of certain people, made or allowed by the powers of the state, which thus puts these people in the position of an alien or unenfranchised class, or else out of an aggression on the rights of the state by some corporation calling itself spiritual but really claiming sovereignty over men's actions in the same relations in which the state claims to determine them. There would be nothing tending to international disturbance in the fact that bodies of people who worship God in the Catholic manner live in a state where the majority worship in the Greek or Protestant manner, and alongside of another state where the majority is Catholic, but for one or other or both of these circumstances, viz. that the Catholic worship and teaching is interfered with by the Protestant or Greek state, and that Catholics are liable to a direction by a power which claims to regulate men's transactions with each other by a law of its own, and which may see fit (e.g.) to prohibit the Catholic subjects in the Greek or Protestant state from being married, or having their parents buried, or their children taught the necessary arts, in the manner which the state directs. This reciprocal invasion of right, the invasion of the rights of the state by the church on the one side, and on the other the restriction placed by the sovereign upon the subject's freedom, not of conscience, (for that is impossible), but of expressing his conscience in word and act, has sometimes caused a state of things in which certain of the subjects of a state have been better affected to another state than to their own, and in such a case there is an element of natural hostility between the states. An obvious instance to give of this relation between states would have been that between Russia and Turkey, if Turkey could be considered to have been constituted as a state at all. Perhaps a better instance would be the position of Ireland in the past; its disaffection to England and gravitation, first to France, then to the United States, caused chiefly by Protestant penal laws which in turn were at least provoked by the aggressive attitude of the church towards the English state. Whenever a like invasion of rights still takes place, e.g. in the treatment of the Catholic subjects of Russia in Poland, in the ultramontane movement of resistance to certain requirements of the state among the Catholic subjects of Germany, it tends to international conflict. And what is now a somewhat remote tendency has in the past been a formidable stimulant to war.