    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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