    32

    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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