    15

    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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