It would appear to be generally true that society at this moment is not chiefly concerned with either love or justice, renunciation or discipline, not with the supplanting of the old order, but with perpetuating the naturalistic principle by means of a partial redivision of the spoils, a series of compromises, designed to make it more tolerable for one class of its former victims.  Thus in capital we have the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on humanity by a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, calculated to make men comfortable so that they may not struggle to be free, or by huge gifts to education, to philanthropy, to religion.  In labor we see men rising in brute fury against both employer and society.  They deny the basic necessities of life to their fellow citizens; they bring the bludgeon of the picket down upon the head of the scab; by means of the closed shop they refuse the right to work to their brother craftsmen; they level the incapable men up and the capable men down by insisting upon uniformity of production and wage.  Thus they replace the artificial inequality of the aristocrat with the artificial equality of the proletariat, striving to organize a new tyranny for the old.  It is significant that our society believes that this is the only way by which it can gain its rights.  That betrays our real infidelity.  For between the two, associated capital and associated labor, what is there to choose today?  By what law, depending upon what sort of power, is each seeking its respective ends?  By the unwritten law of heaven?  No.  By the humane law, some objective standard of common rights and inclusive justice?  No!  By the ancient law that the only effectual appeal is to might and that opportunity therefore justifies the deed?  On the whole it is to this question that we must answer, yes!

Turn away now from national economics and industry to international politics.  Does not its real politik make the philosophical naturalism of Spencer and Haeckel seem like child’s play?  For long there has been one code of ethics for the peaceful penetration of commercially desirable lands, for punitive expeditions against peoples possessed of raw materials, for international banking and finance and diplomatic intercourse, and another code for private honor and personal morality.  There has been one moral scale of values for the father of his family and another for the same man as ward or state or federal politician; one code to govern internal disputes within the nation; another code to govern external disputes between nations.  And what is this code that produced the Prussian autocracy, that long insisted on the opium trade between India and China, that permitted the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and then Japan into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into Shantung, that insists upon retaining the Turk in Constantinople, that produced the already discredited treaty of Versailles?