""Niceness", the desire "to do the decent thing" – these qualities constituted then, and still constitute today, the emotional essence of small 'l' liberalism. They are qualities desirable in a friend, a neighbour or a colleague, and admirable in the citizen of a democracy. But they serve ill as a guide to a nation's total strategy in a ruthless world of struggle. The dominance of these qualities over the British public mind and feelings therefore accounts more than any other factor for the contrast between British power in 1918 and British power in 1956. For the desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing" lay at the heart of "appeasement", whether of dictators in the 1930s or trade unions in the 1940s and 1950s; it explains why the British saw their colonial empire as a trust, a civilising mission, rather than as a resource to be exploited if profitable, and dumped if not; it explains why the British saw the Commonwealth and the Sterling Area – indeed, world affairs in general – in terms of altruistic responsibility rather than of self-interested calculation. And it was this same desire to be "nice" and "do the decent thing", rather than a resolve to improve the competitive quality of Britain's human resources, which provided the inspiration behind "New Jerusalem"."