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You'll recall that in the 1860s, as England was about to enter its slump,
two other countries were on the verge of taking over the lead. One was the
United States. The other was Germany. As I mentioned earlier, when
German industry raked in the deutschemarks hand over fist, it didn't make the
citizens of Hamburg and Berlin blissfully content, it made them hunger for
more. A testosterone jolt roused Teutonic ambitions... and the will to use
violence to achieve them.70
The man who embodied his county's new mood was a six-foot tall
Junker with flaming red hair, Otto von Bismarck. From his earliest years,
Bismarck had loved bloodthirsty showdowns. During his university days,
he turned seemingly harmless debates into ultimate tests of honor. In just his
first nine months at school, young Otto challenged 25 students who
disagreed with him to duels, and he always emerged from these homicidal
confrontations on top.71
In 1862, eleven years before England's downhill slide revealed itself in
the Great Depression, Bismarck became Prussia's premier. Prussia had used
its huge coal fields to fuel new iron and steel plants, plants that put it in the
forefront of the industrial revolution. The result: "an age of plenty."72 Otto
could sense opportunity in the air. He wasn't the type to let a winning
chance pass him by.
The Prussian parliament was dedicated to peace. Otto von Bismarck
was not. Bismarck showed his contempt for mild-mannered solutions at a
meeting of the parliamentary budget commission in 1862. "The great
questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and majority
resolutions," he declared in a statement that would be quoted for the next
hundred years, "... but by iron and blood."73 So Bismarck circumvented
Prussia's parliamentary delegates and furtively used illegal means to siphon
money into a military buildup.74 Bismarck boosted the size of the Prussian
standing army dramatically and made enormous investments in new
weapons, including hi-tech cannons from Krupp that could fire a shell twice
as far as any other artillery piece known to man.75
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