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 sleek,
comfortable fishes who sail up and down the stream waving their tails
and despising the poor damaged things thrashing around on the bank.
He--the lecturer--did not say anything about men, but it is easy enough
to think of us poor devils on the dry bank, struggling without enough to
live on, while the comfortable fellows sail along in the water with all