On the eve of the 1918 election the prime minister expressed his political ideal in the formula that England had to be made a home fit for heroes. How far he has realised this ideal in the years during which he has ruled the House of Commons without opposition is a question which the heroes themselves are best qualified to answer; but, exalted as was his vision, some may still feel that, since England contains men and women of most unheroic stature and is but a part of the inhabited world, his formula was inadequate. The young men of the generation which this book has attempted to describe were, from the first awakening of their intelligence, exercised over the function of government and divided over its aim by the political philosophy which they hammered out for themselves in reading and discussion. From different angles and by different paths they reached agreement on the postulate that, before all else, every man should have secured to him the minimum of essentials. He could not claim food, air and warmth of natural "right", for in organised society a man enjoys only those rights which his fellow-men allow him; but the communists accorded them as a payment on account, and the individualists as an insurance against revolution. Those who fought shy of party labels and regarded themselves as having been born fortuitously and without consultation into a world from which there was no escape but by death felt that they had every inducement to live, by mutual consideration, on the best possible terms with their fellows and that life would be intolerable if a neighbour rifled their pockets as they slept or broke their heads if they snored. Those who gloried in the name of liberals and believed that the end of life was the attainment of beauty included in their minimum the claim that each man should have secured to him the chance of making his own life beautiful. With generosity not yet tarnished by experience and with hatred of injustice not yet tempered by custom, these young men felt that they could not be wholly comfortable while others were uncomfortable: the cries of the suffering might banish sleep, their desperation might threaten security; if they obtruded it, as they were so tastelessly prone to do, their misery might disquiet an over-active conscience. Policy joined hands with humanity in favour of giving every one his minimum of essentials.