The religious tolerance and liberty of the modern era are rather features of a wider phenomenon, the general increase of tolerance and liberty, and they must be ascribed to the same causes as this wider fact. They imply a great evolution of the moral tradition, the most important and striking feature of which is the expansion of the sphere in which the sympathetic feelings find application. There is no reason to suppose that the feelings and emotions underlying the sympathetic and considerate treatment of others have changed in character in the historic period. For long ages men have felt such sympathy and given considerate and just treatment to those who have been nearest to them; at first to the members of their own immediate family; later to the fellow-members of their own small society; and then, as societies expanded into complex caste societies, to the members of their own caste; later, as castes were broken down, to all their fellow citizens; and still later in some degree to all men. It is this progressive extension of the sphere of imaginative sympathy which, more than anything else, has broken down all the social barriers that confined the energies of men and has set free their various faculties in that competition of ever increasing severity which is the principal cause underlying the modern progress of peoples. It is this which has destroyed nearly all the old bonds that fettered and limited men’s activities in religion, in science, in politics, in art, in commerce, in manufacture, and has brought men in all these spheres into that intense, because free and equal, competition, which produces an ever accelerating progress. It is this which has produced the almost universal acceptance of the entirely and most characteristically modern principle of ‘one man one vote,’ a principle so hard to justify on any ground of expediency, from any considerations of the stability and welfare of the State. It is this also which has led to so greatly increased intercourse between peoples.