eek,
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
they want and despise us because we thrash about." His listener did not
reply, and was evidently dissatisfied both with the explanation and the
application. Doubtless the illustration was bungling in more than its
setting forth, but the story is suggestive.

At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally so
anxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitably
on the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult for
him to see the situation fairly. He becomes insensible to the unselfish
impulse which may prompt a sympathetic strike in behalf of the workers
in a non-union shop, because he allows his mind to dwell exclusively on
the disorder which has become associated with the strike. He is
completely side-tracked by the ugly phases of a great moral movement. It
is always a temptation to assume that the side which has respectability,
authority, and superior intelligence, has therefore righteousness as
well, especially when the same side presents concrete results of
individual effort as over against the less tangible results of
associated effort.

It is as yet most difficult for us to free ourselves from the
individualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in their
social relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring to
produce a social result through all the difficulties of associated
action. The philanthropist still finds his path much easier than do
those who are attempting a social morality. In the first place, the
public, anxious to praise what it recognizes as an undoubted moral
effort often attended with real personal sacrifice, joyfully seizes upon
this manifestation and overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropist
as an old friend in the paths of righteousness, whereas the others are
strangers and possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is easy to confuse
the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the
response to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is often
mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a
social situation its to