agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,
please God, will never break.

Yours always,

G. K. Chesterton.

PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN

I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply
defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables
of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of
hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a
chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due
to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never
found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder;
the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the
disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and
dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure
before we find the disease.

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern
madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak
of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British
Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The
moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal,
we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are
not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity
of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as
if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say
that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that
Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should
soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon
grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation
may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar
applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing
size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature,
and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in
subtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether
an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its
old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical
fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively
describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social dru