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 their gills, and have a terrible time. But after a
while their fins turn into legs and their gills into lungs, and they
have become frogs. Of course they are further along than the sl