BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

found in ethnocentric arguments and the shadowy realm of national character. Mid-century
distinctions between the German methodical “creature of form” and the self-educated, adaptable
Englishman resonated fifty years later in charges that German higher education cultivated the
head at the expense of character. 72 The publication of Edwin Earnest William’s Made in
Germany in 1896, a troubling discourse on Britain’s eroded industrial base, rekindled advocacy
for educational reform along German lines, but resistance to the “tyrannical” Prussian model
continued to reflect hostility toward the alleged evils of state control, deleterious effects on
character, and the basic incompatibility of national temperaments. 73
Belief in race as the primary determinant of character implied that reversion to ancestral
type was inevitable and that social and national policy should be formulated on a racial basis. 74
Despite the mirage of diplomatic security based on Anglo-German racial affinity, the biological
view of imperial rivalry as a competition between races pitted England against Germany as
72 Compare William Howitt, The Rural and Domestic Life of Germany (Philadelphia:
Carey & Hart, 1843; originally, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1842), 185-86,
with Dawson, Germany and the Germans, 1:172-75.
73 Edwin Earnest Williams, Made in Germany, 4th edition, (London: Heinemann, 1896).
An alarmist polemic advocating the German model in technical education can be found in “The
Decline and Fall of British Industrial Supremacy: An Appeal for Instant Action Ere it be Too
Late,” Review of Reviews, 14 (July 1896): 83. See also Halevy, Triumph of Reform, 221-22, on
English aversion to the Prussian model, and George Haines, IV, Essays On German Influence
Upon English Education and Science, 1850-1919 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1957), 138-39,
and the chapter on “The German Model” for a discussion of contemporary criticisms.
74 Macnamara, Origin of the English People, 212, for example, saw a “reversion to the
Iberian type at the expense of the Teutonic element” in the smaller stature and darker complexion
of London’s laboring classes. A stint in the British navy was prescribed to reverse this tendency
(p. 231). He also predicted a time “not far distant when vast hordes of the Mongolian or the
brachycephalic race, will again overwhelm China and ultimately the whole of Asia” (p. 220).
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