With both preliminary and then interim conclusions now in hand from the previous chapters, before ending we do well to return to the leitmotif of our essay. We first enunciated this leitmotif in our initial “Orientations” and then detailed this major theme further in the “Interlude.” That leitmotif has been the suggestiveness of the linguistic and conceptual richness of some of the European high modernist poetry of suffering for achieving eventual consensus about the resources and liabilities of forms of moral intuitionism for coming properly to know and to re-articulate the principled bases of a common EU social policy. Consider then briefly a final time the need for and the difficulties in achieving a common European harmonized social policy.

Homeless in Europe

Many more persons today travel very far and very widely than in the previous generations. On their return home these people usually have stories to tell of their adventures among peoples they had met for the first time and of places they had not visited previously. Like Herodotus fashioning an occasion for recounting his adventures, such people return home from their extensive travels and oft en make an opportunity for recounting their adventures in great detail for the delight and instruction of their friends and neighbours.

Sometimes, however, these otherwise exhilarating stories end with sad accounts of the quite extreme poverty of so many persons glimpsed along the way.