Despite Britain being finally bankrupted and its Empire soon to be dispersed, and while Eastern Europeans were sold down their various rivers to Moscow, in Western Europe and North America, the immediate moral and social scene after World War II appeared at first chastened but not radically changed from its state of inter-war complacency. Certainly there arose a feeling in many lands, and immediately in the United Kingdom, that the old social injustices must be remedied: this time the peace as well as the war be won. The reformist Attlee government swept away some long-standing social evils, most notably by the construction of a National Health Service.