elf no longer shows its former
power of expansion. The nation passed the responsibility for its
economic welfare on to the individual; and the individual with all his
energy and initiative seems unable to hold his own against better
organized competition. Its competitors have profited by the very
qualities which Great Britain renounced when she accepted the
anti-national liberalism of the Manchester school. They have shown under
widely different conditions the power of nationalizing their economic
organization; and in spite of the commission of many errors,
particularly in this country, a system of national economy appears to
make for a higher level of economic vitality than a system of
international economy. "At the present time," says Mr. O. Elzbacher in
his "Modern Germany," "when other nations are no longer divided against
themselves, but have become homogeneous unified nations in fact and
nations in organization, and when the most progressive nations have
become gigantic institutions for self-improvement and gigantic business
concerns on cooeperative principles, the spasmodic individual efforts of
patriotic and energetic Englishmen and their unorganized individual
action prove less efficient for the good of their country than they were
formerly." The political leaders of England abandoned, that is, all
leadership in economic affairs and allowed a merely individualistic
liberalism complete control of the fiscal and economic policy of the
country. The government resigned economic responsibility at the very
time when English economic interests began to need vigilant protection
and promotion; and as a consequence of this resignation the English
governing class practically surrendered its primary function. What
seemed to be an easy transferal to more competent shoulders of the
national responsibility for the economic welfare of the country has
proved to be a betrayal of the national interest.

Fiscal reform alone will, however, never enable Great Britain to compete
more vigorously with either the United States or Germany. The diminished
economic vitality of England must be partly traced to her tradition of
political and social subserviency, which serves to rob both the ordinary
and the exceptional Englishmen of energy and efficiency. American
energy, so far as it is applied to economic tasks, is liberated not
merely by the abundance of its opportunities, but by the prevailing idea
that every man should make as much of h