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 advantage of them. The War of 1914 decided the right of Great Britain to rule the Near East as well as Southern Asia and the strategic points of Africa. In the stripping of the vanquished and in the division of the spoils of war the British lion proved to be the lion indeed. But the same forces that gave the British the run of the Old World called into existence a rival in the New.