the means which experience has taught us are most conducive to the end. Thus it is our right and our duty to draw under our dominion other nations, especially the uncivilized, when the interest of our independence requires it. Therefore we cannot reproach the Americans if they conquer Cuba and the Philippines; nor can we morally condemn England when it claims that it needs rule over Kimberley and Johannesburg for its self-preservation. We may set forth our opposing interests and say that it is not to the advantage of Germany that England should rule alone in South Africa; but we have no right to reproach the English as immoral because they take care of their own interests. That is a conclusion from the highest moral principle of all politics, for we should not condemn in an antagonist what we consider in a similar situation right in ourselves. If the Evangelical Social Congress had set forth these ethical principles in their application to other nations, it would have been in opposition to the ordinary declarations of our public press, but it would have correctly stated the moral task of a people which is conducting world-politics.
As already said, the congress has only casually touched this fundamental side of the question. So it happened that Adolph Wagner, who took the skeptical attitude, was the first speaker in the debate, and meantime the leaders directed attention to other points. The first leader who spoke was Professor Rathgen, who had long served as professor in Tokio, Japan, and who had written a book on Japan's state economy, which may be known in America. He admitted the necessity, and therefore the rectitude, of an expansion policy in advance, and simply called attention to two questions: What are the right motives of a world policy; and, What moral principles should control the treatment of uncivilized nations which have been subdued? In reference to the first question, he denied that economic motives alone should urge a nation in the path of imperialism. There must be added a feeling of responsibility to lower peoples, the desire to coöperate in the rising civilization of mankind, even directly to labor in the service of the ideals of humanity which rises above nationality.
