Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of the community is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and, curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are a matter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of the community’s humanity and enlightenment.  If the method of public agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we should have the ideal development of the democratic state.

But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, not by their declaration of principles, which we seldom read, but by their blundering efforts to apply their principles to actual conditions, and by the oft-time failure of their representatives, when the individual finds himself too weak to become the organ of corporate action.

The very blunders and lack of organization too often characterizing a union, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, often confuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trust uncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort.  The situation is made even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating a code of associated action so often break through the established code of law and order.  As society has a right to demand of the reforming individual that he be sternly held to his personal and domestic claims, so it has a right to insist that labor organizations shall keep to the hardly won standards of public law and order; and the community performs but its plain duty when it registers its protest every time law and order are subverted, even in the interest of the so-called social effort.  Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community is confronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact that the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that which may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice between virtue and virtue.  In the disorder and confusion sometimes incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see anything but the unlovely struggle itself.

The writer recalls a conversation between two workingmen who were leaving a lecture on “Organic Evolution.”  The first was much puzzled, and anxiously inquired of the second “if evolution could mean that one animal turned into another.”  The challenged workman stopped in the rear of the hall, put his foot upon a chair, and expounded what he thought evolution did mean; and this, so nearly as the conversation can be recalled, is what he said:  “You see a lot of fishes are living in a stream, which overflows in the spring and strands some of them upon the bank.  The weak ones die up there, but others make a big effort to get back into the water.  They dig their fins into the sand, breathe as much air as they can with