And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will, of course, be the general work of Christendom, and given the conditions which now obtain, the development will go on _pari passu_ in all nations or not all. It will not be the work of "nations" at all; it will be the work of individual men. States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think, and the number of those men who will act as pioneers in a better policy must, of course, at first be small: a group here and a group there, the best men of all countries--England, France, Germany, America--influencing by their ideas finally the great mass. To say, as so many do in this matter: "Let other nations do it first" is, of course, to condemn us all to impotence--for the other nations use the same language. To ask that one group of forty 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.