7
The Victorian Decline And The Fall of America
"Whether a nation be today mighty and rich or not depends not on the
abundance or security of its power or riches, but principally on whether its
neighbors possess more or less of it."
Philip Von Hornigk, German
mercantilist, c. 1690
Violence is not the only way a nation can be beaten in the hierarchical
race. The Red Queen, famed for her grouchy rumblings in Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking Glass, once said that to stay in place you have to run
very, very hard, and to get anywhere, you have to run even harder. Stalin
put it differently: "those who lag behind are beaten." That is especially true
for superorganisms.
Victorian England forgot the Red Queen's wisdom. In the process,
Britain lost her dominance of the world.
The Victorians said that the sun never set on their Empire, and the
claim was quite literally true. Under Victoria's hand, the English dominated
25% of the land surface of the earth.1 They ruled more than twelve million
square miles of territory and a quarter of the globe's population.2 They
produced a massive 22.9% of all the world's goods.
But that magnificent state of affairs was not to last forever. The
Empire that spanned a planet has disappeared. The British share of world
productivity has slipped from almost 23% to three.3 What happened? More
important, could the same fate be overtaking us?
The foundations of Victorian power were laid over a generation before
round-faced queen Victoria was born. From 1790 to 1815, British exports
skyrocketed. Britain had come up with some startling industrial
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