indignant if it were strong. The social case is
exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree, like
doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about
the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is
unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half
would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent
that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity.
We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should
differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree
about the bad public house. It would be precisely in front of the good
public-house that our painful personal fracas would occur.

I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite
useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing
prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another
business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We
all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity.
The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social
ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot
of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we
do not ask what is right.

*****

II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless
and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came
first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood,
it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter
on those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the
chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The
evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the
vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ
that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of
thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified
in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by
a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is
to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a
distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our
mental chain, it is absolutely