In 1890 there were still twice as many academic chemists in Germany as in Britain, though the British population was three-quarters of the German fig… - Correlli Barnett

[T]he Cabinet...continued to put their faith in bringing about the "appeasement" of Europe by negotiation; in other words, in reaching a general settlement of all outstanding European problems with the co-operation and consent of Nazi Germany... The Cabinet thus elected to follow a course of action which stood in flat contradiction to their own expressed convictions about the nature and aims of the Nazi régime, and about the worth of the Nazi signature.
Nothing could be more in the romantic tradition than so to reject what was dictated by knowledge and commonsense, and instead pursue the impossible but ideal. But this was a Cabinet refulgent with high ideals – high Victorian ideals. By the mid-1930s the direction of English policy had fallen even more completely into the hands of clergymen manqués than during the 1920s and for the most part clergymen manqués now well advanced in middle-age or even into elderliness. In Baldwin's Cabinet in 1936, MacDonald, Runciman, Kingsley Wood, Neville Chamberlain and Simon represented the nonconformist conscience; Halifax and Hoare the High Church; and Inskip the evangelicals. Their approach to world affairs owed no less to Victorian liberalism, for they were deeply imbued with its abhorrence of struggle and its optimistic faith in human reason and goodwill... The political and moral equipment of the English cabinet ministers of 1936–7, being thus designed for an historical situation which had long since disappeared, was useless in the present international environment.

Yet there had been an educational revolution in Britain since the 1820s—the reform and expansion of the public schools which produced the British governing élite. And it is in the nature of the Victorian public school that we find the other key factor explaining why Britain was so slow and so inadequate in educating for industrial capability. The Victorian public school was inspired by the religious and moral idealism of the Romantic Movement. It turned away from the realities of the industrialized world of the era and from such topics as science and technology.

Cobden in his boundless mid-Victorian optimism about free trade could no more have imagined such a plight than Adam Smith could have imagined refrigerated cargo ships bringing meat from the New World to undercut British livestock farmers. Perhaps their intellectual descendants today are at times too preoccupied with peacetime world trade and the advantages of economic specialisation between nations, to the neglect of the total-strategic implications in wartime of such specialisation. But at least Adam Smith himself recognised that, in his words, "defence, however, is of much greater importance than opulence".