4. The ruling class must be schooled in the art of rulership. The
next two generations will accomplish that result.

The American plutocracy must carry on. It must consolidate its gains and
move forward to greater achievements, with the goal clearly in mind and
the necessities of imperial power thoroughly mastered and understood.

XVII. THE NEW IMPERIAL ALIGNMENT

1. _A Survey of the Evidence_

Through the centuries empires have come and gone. In each age some
nation or people has emerged--stronger, better organized, more
aggressive, more powerful than its neighbors--and has conquered
territory, subjugated populations, and through its ruling class has
exploited the workers at home and abroad.

Europe has been for a thousand years the center of the imperial
struggle,--the struggle which called into being the militarism so hated
by the European peoples. It was from that struggle that millions fled to
America, where they hoped for liberty and peace.

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of Great Britain to a position
of world authority. During the nineteenth century she held her place
against all rivals. With the assistance of Prussia, she overthrew
Napoleon at Waterloo. In the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War she
halted the power of the Czar. Half a century after Waterloo Germany,
under the leadership of Prussia won the Franco-Prussian War, and by that
act became the leading rival of the British Empire. Following the war,
which gave Germany control of the important resources included in Alsace
and Lorraine, there was a steady increase in her industrial efficiency;
the success of her trade was as pronounced as the success of her
industries, and by 1913 the Germans had a merchant fleet and a navy
second only to those of Great Britain.

Germany's economic successes, and her threat to build a railroad from
Berlin to Bagdad and tap the riches of the East, led the British to form
alliances with their traditional enemies--the French and the Russians.
Russia, after the breakdown of Czarism in 1917, dropped out of the
Entente, and the United States took her place among the Allies of the
British Empire. During the struggle France was reduced to a mere shell
of her former power. The War of 1914 bled her white, loaded her with
debt, disorganized her industries, demoralized her finances, and
although it restored to her important mineral resources, it left her too
weak and broken to take real advant