The decision as to what form a memorial to Charles Booth should take had been deferred because he died during the war. However, in 1922 it was eventually decided to press ahead with the endowment of a Charles Booth Chair of Social Science at the University of Liverpool. It was an admirably appropriate decision because Booth had not only been a Liverpool shipowner but had pioneered the study of society with his great survey of the Life and Labour of the People of London (op. cit., p. 69). The spirit of reconstruction was in the air. The war stood for a clean sweep of old ideas and old ways of doing things. The spontaneous philanthropy of the past must give way to a planned and organised attack on the problem of poverty. What more appropriate memorial to the great pioneer of the application of scientific method to social conditions could there be than a tangible commitment to the furtherance of the approach he had pioneered. The School of Social Science, as the new Professor declared in his Inaugural Lecture, was to be a centre of citizenship as well as of teaching and research.