hat in social matters we must actually find the cure before we
find the disease." The thing that is most terribly wrong with our
modern civilisation is that it has lost not only health but the clear
picture of health. The doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness
does not say: we have had too much scarlet fever, let us try a little
measles for a change. But the sociological doctor does offer to the
dispossessed proletarian a cure which, says Chesterton, is only
another kind of disease. We cannot work towards a social ideal until
we are certain what that ideal should be. We must, therefore, begin
with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of
man, largely through a study of his history. Man has had
historically--and man needs for his fulfilment--the family, the home
and the possession of property. The notion of property has, for the
modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of Capitalism; but modern
Capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of
its limitations. He summarises this idea with one of his most
brilliant illustrations: "It is the negation of property that the
Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as
it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one
harem."

But property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the
survival of the family. It is its protection, it is the opportunity
of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation--He can
make something out of nothing; but He has given to Man the joy of
limited creation--Man can make something out of anything. "Fruitful
strife with limitations," self-expression "with limits that are
strict and even small,"--all this belongs to the artist, but also to
the average man. "Property is merely the art of the democracy."

The family, protected by the possession of some degree of property,
will grow by its own laws. What are these laws? Clearly there are two
sets of problems, one concerned with life within the family, the
other with the relation of the family to the state. These two sets of
problems provide the subject-matter of the book. On both Chesterton
felt that there had been insufficient thinking. Thus he says of the
first: "There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of
what sex is, of whether it alters this or that." And of the second:
"It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the State but
do not believe in the Family. But