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? What is the code that
made the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army,
navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, of
cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and