The body politic is sick, and physicians crowd to the bedside. We must surely still be very rich, for only the rich ever have so many doctors. It is the paradise of the diagnostician. Take up any paper or review, and you will find some symptom of the general disease explained: get this right, they say, and health will return. Unfortunately, the doctors do not agree, and this is not really surprising. If you are ill, the doctors may disagree about the treatment, they may even diifer in their diagnosis, but they are at least agreed about one thing, and that thing is health. Here the parallel breaks down hopelessly; there are nearly as many different ideas of social health as there are diagnoses. The patient may sometimes be excused for feeling that he prefers the disease he already has to the other disease that he is promised as a cure. And it is not as if the notion of health were always a reasoned thing. All kinds of preferences based, however unconsciously, on prejudice or personal taste and convenience have their say in it. If you doubt this, read Mr. Clayton’s article in the December Blackfriars, apply the method to yourself, and then plead Not Guilty, if you can. This is, in brief, the case for Catholic diagnosis of the public disease, for Catholicism knows what health is, and therefore knows what is disease and what is not. Not that individual Catholics may not be mistaken; failure to apply their own principles to themselves will make them as liable to prejudice and selfinterest as other men. But the principles are there, clear and ascertainable and constant, and for this reason alone Catholic diagnosis would be irreplaceable.