Now the question at the bottom of these can be reduced to very simple terms. If all members of the community were content with existing social arrangements, it is needless to say there would be no social problems at all. Such problems are due entirely to the existence of persons who are not contented, and who desire that certain of these arrangements should be changed. It will be seen, accordingly, that the great and fundamental question which, as a practical guide, the sociologist is asked to answer, is whether or how far the changes desired by the discontented are practicable; and the first step towards ascertaining how far the arrangements in question can be turned into something which they are not, is to ascertain precisely how they have come to be what they are. But this way of putting the case is still not sufficiently definite. Mr. Spencer himself has put it in somewhat similar language; and yet in doing so he has missed the heart of the problem. Mr. Spencer’s speculative gaze, travelling over the past and present, sees one generation melting like a cloud into another, and takes no note of the individuals that compose each. The practical sociologist must adopt a very different method of observation. He must remember that practical problems arise {46} and become practical, not in virtue of their relation to mankind generally, but in virtue of their relation to each particular generation that is confronted by them; and a particular generation in any given community, and the different classes into which the community is divided, are made up respectively of particular men and women. In asking, therefore, how the social arrangements we have been considering have come to be what they are, we must not ask in vague and general terms why a portion of the social aggregate occupies a position which contents it, and another portion a position which exasperates it; but we must consider the individuals of which each portion, at any given time, is composed, and begin the inquiry at the point at which they begin it themselves. “Why am I—Tom or Dick or Harry—included in that portion of the aggregate which occupies an inferior position? And why are these men—William or James or George—more fortunate than I, and included in the portion of the aggregate which occupies a superior position?” To this question there are but three possible answers. The inferior position of Tom or Dick or Harry is due to his differing from William or James or George in external circumstances, which theoretically, at all events, might all be equalised—such, for example, as his education; or it is due to his differing from them in certain congenital faculties, with respect to which men can never be made equal—as, for example, in his brain power or his physical energy; or it is due to his differing {47} from them in external circumstances which have arisen naturally from differences in the congenital faculties of others, and which, if they could be equalised at all,