their feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to the
state, in order to secure protection for themselves and for their
children. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionally
successful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in the
factories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy.

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,