What’s Wrong with the World

“Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion,” G. K. Chesterton insists—and a nation, he warns, cannot be cured like a sick body. Before we diagnose what is wrong with the world, shouldn’t we decide what is right?

Writing amid the social debates of the early twentieth century, Chesterton takes aim at the experts who catalogue poverty and public abuses, then prescribe a remedy without agreeing on what a healthy society should be. With comic force, he turns their medical metaphors inside out: people may share a dislike of a bad institution, yet quarrel fiercely over what would make it good. The real dispute, he argues, is not simply about the disease but about the desired cure—and some people’s cures look to others like fresh maladies. What ideal should guide the diagnosis?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.