the Industrial Revolution, at least, London, with the exception of the few
years when England suffered from the American revolt of 1776, has assumed
steadily more the aspect of the great international centre of exchanges,
until with Waterloo her supremacy remained unchallenged. It was this
brilliant achievement of London, won chiefly by arms, which more than any
other cause impelled Germany to try her fortunes by war rather than by the
methods of peace.

Nor was the German calculation of chances unreasonable or unwarranted. For
upwards of two centuries Germany had found war the most profitable of all
her economic ventures; especially had she found the French war of 1870 a
most lucrative speculation. And she felt unbounded confidence that she
could win as easy a triumph with her army, over the French, in the
twentieth as in the nineteenth century. But, could she penetrate to Paris
and at the same time occupy the littoral of the Channel and Antwerp, she
was persuaded that she could do to the commerce of England what England
had once done to the commerce of Spain, and that Hamburg and Berlin would
supplant London. And this calculation might have proved sound had it not
been for her oversight in ignoring one essential factor in the problem.
Ever since North America was colonized by the English, that portion of the
continent which is now comprised by the Republic of the United States, had
formed a part of the British economic system, even when the two fragments
of that system were competing in war, as has occurred more than once. And
as America has waxed great and rich these relations have grown closer,
until of recent years it has become hard to determine whether the centre
of gravity of this vast capitalistic mass lay to the east or to the west
of the Atlantic. One fact, however, from before the outset of this war had
been manifest, and that was that the currents of movement flowed with more
power from America to England than from America to Germany. And this had
from before the outbreak of hostilities affected the relations of the