THE SOCIAL OBJECTS OF THE NATIONAL-SOCIAL MOVEMENT IN GERMANY.'
The National Socialists constitute the most recent group among the political parties in Germany. The father of this movement was in reality J. H. Wichern, the founder of the Ger- man Inner Mission. This Inner Mission is the organization of the practical philanthropy of the German Protestant church, which is, as is doubtless known in America, a truly powerful and beneficent agency. Yet, with all its practical labor, it attains only one object : it mitigates and restricts, but does not remove, distress. Although it momentarily and for a time assists indi- vidual sufferers, for the most part it does not permanently stop the sources of misery. It is, however, clear that if this could be attained it would denote a still higher and triumphant evi- dence of the power of Christianity, the religion of love. But the sources of modern social distress are not in the fault of indi- vidual persons, but principally in the structure of the modern economic system. If Christianity is ever to help destroy these evils in their origin, it must venture out upon the sea of social politics and of political action in general.
This course, which Wichern and his contemporaries did not take, was pursued by Dr. Stocker, formerly Berlin court preacher. He started the Christian Social movement, initiated the Evan- gelical Social Congress, and his friends established the evangeli- cal workingmen's associations. These three organizations still exist, and, in spite of the decline of social enthusiasm in Ger- many, labor on faithfully and assiduously, and have an acknowl- edged record of success in economic science and in practical politics. But they have all come by experience to discover that the social ethics of Christianity can indeed supply a moral basis of a general kind for social work and social politics, but not
■ The name of Paul Gohre will be recognized as that of the author of Three Months in a Workshop and of Die evangelisch-soziale Bewegung. The translation of this article is by C. R. Henderson.
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