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stre ngth had come from the spinning jenny, the steam-driven loom, the
Cunard steamship and the railroad.
But Britain forgot that industrial innovation was the key to her power.
Floundering British industrial titans dreamed of holding on to their old
position by force.  From 1880 to 1900, Britain raised her warship tonnage by
64%.  And she nearly doubled the number of men she kept in arms.
In the last analysis, power comes from the vigor of minds.  The English
were blind to this fact; the Germans were not.  Germany maintained the best
school system in the world.  By the 1890's, she had 2.5 times as many
university students per unit of population as England.21
Victorian England, like today's US, maintained the illusion of
prosperity while that prosperity's foundations were being eaten away.  In the
late 1890s, Britain recovered from the Great Depression and looked
prosperous and expansive.  Plants were operating at capacity, and new
industries were doing well.  The upper classes were making money by the
fistful.  But appearances were deceiving.   Big business was defending itself
through counterproductive mergers and takeovers.22  The gap between rich
and poor was growing ever greater.  And England was slipping downward
in the pecking order of nations.
Meanwhile, Germany was moving up the hierarchical ladder, and the
German leaders were gripped by the testosterone high that makes a nation
belligerent.  Friedrich Naumann was typical of those who gloated over
Teutonic good fortune.  Said he, "The German race brings it.  It brings army,
navy, money and power. ...Modern, gigantic instruments of power are
possible  only when an active people feels the spring-time juices in its
organs."23  Like the Arizona toad in a downpour, the German superorganism
was waking up.  And sudden prosperity, as I've mentioned, does not bring
peace.  The result: the First World War.
Officially, Britain won the Great War.  Yet in the coming years she
would lose her empire.  She had already lost her prosperity.  The British
worker, once the highest paid in the world, would eventually become one of
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