One of the great similarities between Britain and the US in the late 19th century is the increasing death rate and stagnant birth rate of the urban population, creating, in the US, a population that did not grow naturally but one that relied upon the ever growing influx of immigrants; whereas, in Britain, it was its own falling birthrate - due to an extremely high rate of infant mortality - and a very low life expectancy if you survived birth (but lived and worked in an unhealthy urban environment) that, along with continual emigration to the US, Canada, Africa and Australasia, kept the heart of empire continually short of much needed manpower. As the US filled up with new, mainly young people, Britain began to empty. Something had to be done to stop people leaving.

And it would be the altruism of certain industrialists who slowly began to improve things in Britain, with many seeing it as their duty to build hospitals and better housing for their employees, if only to ensure they had a healthy workforce that could maintain output and profits, who would, might, feel happy and content with their lot and start to breed. It was, for the late 19th century, a good deal, especially for the workers of the British chocolate giant Cadbury's ( who were, like their rivals Fry's, Quakers) who created a purpose built town (Bournville) for their employees that eventually shamed many local authorities, and national government, into providing better facilities for all. In fact, one of Winston Churchill's (and he was half American) first actions when Home Secretary in the years before the First World War, was to encourage better working conditions in the workplace (and better health care for the young), plus the encouragement of more house building. But this was not for any altruistic reasons, but to ensure that the British armed services, when in need of men, could recruit from a healthier populace. But it would be, in the first instance, those same industrialists who established research programmes (usually set within established universities) to develop vaccines for the defeat of such childhood killer diseases as Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever.

In the US things were somewhat different, with an increasing number of immigrant families - once out of such unhealthy places as New York and Chicago – managing to stay one step ahead of those same fatal infant diseases, only to replace them by the hardships of the new frontier towns, and the deadly trek of getting there, something the social scientists, amongst others, call 'demographic peculiarities', which sounds a bit like a disease itself. But the result, for the survivors of 19th and early 20th century immigration (whether by choice or through slavery, with the total immigrant arrival in the US between 1850 and 1920 some 40 million, which was the total population of Britain in 1881 ) was one of achievement and of a certain hardiness of mind, body and spirit that in itself would help create a more healthy, creative, and determined population that was itself set to go through many testing national and international experiences. The US, as hard as it was, created chances that no other country had ever considered possible.

By the last decades of the 19th century the US had left Britain far behind in population growth, which demanded, and got, a massive increase in house building, and just about every other form of construction one can think of, from railroads to hotels, from department stores to breweries, concert halls to office blocks, universities, hospitals, city halls, and so on, all of which helped fuel the economic engine of the US.

By comparison Britain – which had had something of a housing boom in 1870s – was very slowly, throughout the 1890s and 1910s, rebuilding its population through better health care and better homes, and ensuring, through more state and church schools, and trades colleges, that an ever increasing number of the mass of its population was educated to build and operate the ever more intricate technicalities of an ever growing industrial workplace. And like the US this latent ability had, in Britain, also created something of an economic boom that resulted in more civic building programmes in London, and virtually all of the major industrial capitols of Britain, the results of which – massive town halls, art galleries, universities, churches, cathedrals, the railways and London's Underground, and sprawling suburbs – are still evident today.

One interesting point is that when the US had an economic downturn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain had an upturn, and vis versa. It must be remembered that Britain was still the imperial power, albeit with less wealth (due to a diminishing return from its colonies, and with less countries left to colonise) than it had in the mid 19th century. It would take the First World War, and the years after, to change things forever – although it wasn't realised at the time – with the US becoming the world's creditor and the new, almost invisible, colonial power. By the 1920s, when the US caught a cold Britain sneezed. Nothing has really changed.

To Be Continued...