The Extraordinary prosperity of the Western peoples in Europe and America at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the eve of the first World War, was reached after a long series of efforts which began at about the time Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452. In contrast to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a period of prosperity in most districts of continental Europe. The Middle Ages drew to a close in the midst of great movements of discovery, colonization, and economic progress.

This title calls for an examination of political intervention in a certain field from the viewpoint of ethics. Social action can mean action by a social group or action for a social group or action both by and for a social group. Most frequently the term is used to designate action or activities for social groups which are in some kind of need. The need is not always physical nor does it always imply a degree of want equivalent to destitution. The needy social group may require education rather than physical sustenance and it may already be in possession of a decent minimum of living. “Political intervention” means activity by the state whether the intervention be legislative, administrative or judicial. “Ethics” means ethical principles rather than an ethical treatise. As a code of principles and rules ethics has quite as direct an application to political actions as to the actions of individuals. In other words, a given instance of political intervention in the field of social action is either right or wrong. And the test or criterion of right and wrong is found in man's rational nature, adequately considered; that is, in his constitution and essential relations. From this formulation it is possible to derive all the particular rules of right conduct and the appropriate judgments upon the moraliy of particular actions.

“CHINA AND JAPAN must be good friends and, even though hostilities exist between them now, will become good friends in the long run. … We belong to the same race and we use the same language. Our philosophy, ethics, literature and other cultural aspects of our civilizations are the same. …” Thus wrote, for an American journal, Iwao Okai, University of Chicago student of international affairs, some weeks after the renewed outbreak of hostilities near Peking in the summer of 1937. In thus expressing himself Mr. Okai was but repeating theories, from time to time, inculcated in the youth of his native land — theories, the value of which, groups of his countrymen have attempted, on occasion, to impress upon their Chinese neighbors by means, alternately, of honeyed words and bribery, of bullets and bombs.

DURING that period in which Louis Napoleon enjoyed the reputation of being the Sphinx of Europe (a reputation to which the Austrian ambassador ironically referred: “they called his words silly before he had achieved political power; now they say they are oracular”), the events which called forth perhaps his most sphinx-like behavior, were those connected with the Roman Question. The President Bonaparte who had taken it upon himself to be his uncle's nephew, must have considered the example given by the first Emperor of the French, who expelled the Pope, united Italy, and made Rome the second city of his Empire. But now in 1849 Louis Napoleon had come to be accepted by Europe not as a revolutionary, but as the man who put an end to revolution. And however he may have been tempted to revert to his youthful emulation of the other's revolutionary program, and in spite of the fact that, in his personal feelings, he was little predisposed in the Pope's favor, still his attitude toward Rome was of necessity influenced by the fact that it seemed impossible to maintain supreme power in France without the support of the conservative (French) Catholics. Thus, considerations of French inner policy made for an alternation of the ancient rivalry between France and Austria for the hegemony of Italy and for influence over the Roman court. Indeed there were those in France who went so far as to speak of the common interests that Paris and Vienna shared in Rome: now that Pius, welcomed only a few years ago as “papa angelicus,” as the national pope, had been forced to flee to Gaeta (the possession of the Napolitan “Re Bomba”), the conservative powers of Europe should unite to restore him.

In the preceding sections of this essay, I have outlined a dialectical procedure whereby a doubting mind might be led to the recognition of moral truth. What has been given is the bare plot of a conversation between teacher and student. The student was, at the beginning, a skeptic about moral matters, denying the objectivity of moral knowledge, supposing that all moral judgments were a matter of opinion, entirely relative to the individual or to his cultural location at a given time and place. The teacher, by asking him to explain the undeniable fact that men exercise preference, gradually made him realize that his own criteria for preference — pleasure and quantity of pleasure — had a certain universal validity; and then, as a result of seeing the inadequacy of these criteria, the student began to understand that happiness, rather than pleasure, was the ultimate principle of moral judgments. The crucial steps in the argument were: (1) the distinction between pleasure as one among many objects of desire and pleasure as the satisfaction of any desire; (2) the enumeration of the variety of goods which are objects of human desire; (3) the point that only the totality of goods could completely satisfy desire; (4) the realization that this totality of goods, leaving nothing to be desired, is the end of all our seeking, and that everything else is sought for the sake of its attainment; (5) the conception of happiness as “all good things,” a whole constituted by every type of good, the complete good being the end, the incomplete good its parts or constitutive means; (6) the conclusion that the end, as the first principle in the practical order, is the ultimate criterion of preference, for preferor choice is exercised only with respect to means, and hence we should, in every case, prefer whatever is more conducive to the attainment of happiness.