MORAL AND SOCIAL TASKS OF WORLD POLITICS 313
only because it covers this policy with the pretense that it simply wishes to serve civilization and the general ideal of humanity. This pretense appears to us as hypocrisy, when we see that in the name of humanity that country merely extends its own power and increases its riches. As opposed to this, it is more honorable and more suitable to Protestantism that we carry on world-politics for the sake of the self-preservation of our nation, and because we will not yield our place by the side of the other great peoples of the earth. The expressions of Nau- mann are a consequence of the view, which we stated above, that self-preservation is for a people the supreme moral thought. The individual man must live according to the example of the compassionate Samaritan who offered himself for his neighbor who had fallen among robbers. An entire people, however, would act against its primary moral duty if it should hazard its own existence in order to rescue another. Therefore it hap- pened that from all the Christian peoples not one came to the help of the persecuted Armenians, and that the embassy from the Boers the last few weeks has sought in vain for the inter- vention of any great power.
Naturally we do not mean to say that the extension of the dominion of a great nation may not have for a consequence the service of diffused culture. On the contrary, that will usually happen. But it should be denied that this possible result must under all conditions be a conscious purpose, an efficient motive for the policy of expansion, in order to give it a moral character. This success is usually an unconscious effect of acts which flow from motives of another kind. Exactly in this lies one of the chief factors in the historical progress of the world, that the acts of men have undesigned and unforeseen secondary effects which, when they have become facts, work decisively on the purposeful activity of men. In this phenomenon, which our celebrated philosopher Wilhelm Wundt has called the law of the heterogeny of ends, everyone who regards things from a religious point of view will reverence the control of a unifying will directing the world's history. We go so far as to hope that finally our political work will serve the highest and most general
