Nearly one hundred years ago, Brooks Adams published a short essay
called "The Decay of England." Basing his views on the poor
performance of the British army in the Boer War, the decline of
English agriculture, a lack of entrepreneurial spirit ("the slackness
of London tradesmen"), and the part played by beer in Dickens's
novels, Adams foretold the end of Britain's nineteenth-century
preponderance. He did not welcome this, since he regarded England as
a "fortified outpost of the Anglo-Saxon race," whose future inability
to guarantee the European balance of power would soon require America
"to fight her own battle whether she will or no."
A hundred years later this prophecy has largely been realized.
Subsequently Britain was to help repel two German attempts at
expansion, but the effort was an exhausting one, and, after 1945, the
United States took over the uncomfortable business of maintaining the
European balance of power, as Adams had foreseen. Britain ceased to
be an empire--the most extensive collection of territories ever
accumulated by a European power was disposed of in some twenty-five
years--and is still criticized for backwardness and sloth, most
notably by British journalists. It is also still afflicted by the
bitter taste of a national orgy of self doubt. Thirty years after the
end of empire the shock is dying away, but it still visibly affects
those traditional governing classes who once acted with as supreme a
self-confidence as the Achesons and Lovetts who became their
replacements in the United States after 1945.
