Preparations for another general war were expanded and intensified as the competitive struggle for oil and other natural resources mounted. By the end of the 1960's total arms expenditures of the chief powers were running at $200 billion per year. In 1973 the total reached $225 billion. There was much general talk about peace, but the most insistent note sounded for a high level of spending on armaments. Britain's Prime Minister Heath voiced a sentiment vigorously promulgated by every representative of national security "British interests come first". Confusion was heightened by the presence of men who faced all three ways: talking peace, waging small wars and preparing for the next big one. In February, 1974 in his State of the Union message to the U.S. Congress, President Nixon spoke of "our goal of building a structure of lasting peace in the world." At the same moment the Washington administration was feeding the fires of war in South East Asia and asking the United States Congress to increase 1975 U.S.A. defense appropriations from $80 billion to $90 billion per year. When war ended in 1945 there was a planet-wide sigh of relief and a devout hope that after so many years of local and general wars, the time had come for western man to take a long decisive step in the direction of peace. The United Nations Charter expressed this hope to end the use of war as an instrument of policy. Since the period of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer, planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and transformed the social environment. Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of an agricultural-feudal society. Improvements in navigation and the growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched businessmen and their associates and dependents. Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political, economic and cultural institutions and practices.