CHAPTER XIV

THE EXPANSION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON AND THE SLAV

In such manner this tragedy, called the French Revolution, was played to its dénouement at Waterloo on the European stage, and on its conclusion, despite all the agony, we find that stage strangely little altered. Norway had been separated from Denmark and joined to Sweden. Belgium was no longer Austrian, and Belgium and Holland were united as the kingdom of the Netherlands. Austria had become independent of the rest of Germany and was dominant in Italy, but all main boundaries of the greater nations' territories were restored nearly as they were before.

A great change, however, had been wrought in the minds of men, by the French Revolution in the first place and by the Napoleonic wars in the second. Kings had been so thrown from their pedestals and set up again that they could never more have the sanctity in the eye of the people which they had long enjoyed. The exaggerated reverence paid to social rank, surviving from the exaggerated regard paid to the knight by popular opinion in the Middle Ages, had gone. The no less exaggerated ideas on the subject of liberty with which the Revolution had opened had been modified by the inevitable discovery that it is impossible for men to live together in anarchy and without discipline. Indeed there was a marked reaction in thought for a {179} few years after the Revolution, because men had realised the excesses to which these liberal ideas could lead. But still all that was best in those ideas was retained. The principle was conceded that no class should be treated as slaves by the class above. Even the humblest was recognised to have his rights as man.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson which had to be learnt by all men, kings, nobles, and poor men alike, from those cruel years in Europe; and it was more important than changes in territorial possessions.

[Sidenote: Anglo-Saxon world-power]

But if political boundaries were little altered in Europe by the fighting of the Napoleonic wars, a very extensive change will be seen to have occurred during those years if we take the whole world-stage into our view. The Anglo-Saxon had been extending his possessions and his domination almost immeasurably.

Since Great Britain was the strongest sea-power, and at war, at one time or other of the Napoleonic period, with France, Spain, and Holland--that is to say, with all the colonising nations, except Portugal--it was only to be expected that she should have captured nearly all the colonial possessions of each. And this actually is what had occurred. Moreover, on her own account she had established new settlements in places which seemed favourable for trade.

The boundaries of Canada and most of what now is British in the North of America had been settled by the wars with the French in that region, and by the War of American Independence, before the French Revolution and all that followed it. One of its consequences was indeed a renewed and lamentable outbreak of war, in 1812, between the now independent States and the mother country. The integrity of Canada was threatened by it at one moment, but in the end the boundaries were left as before.

{180} New Zealand, as we have seen, had been declared a British possession in 1787. British colonists had established themselves in New South Wales in the year following. Honduras had become British some years earlier. And Britain had her African West Coast Settlement at Sierra Leone.

Then in 1795 Ceylon was ceded to her by the Dutch, and from that time onward until the end of the wars almost every year added to her colonies. Already she had many of the West Indian islands. Now she acquired Trinidad, a little later St. Lucia, and in the same year Tasmania and British Guiana. In 1800 she gained Malta. In 1806 the Cape of Good Hope and the Seychelles, which had been held by the Dutch, were given up to her. A year later she took the island of Heligoland. Mauritius passed to her by capitulation in 1810; and at the conclusion of the war she was confirmed by the King of the Netherlands in her unquestioned domination in South Africa. All the while, moreover, she was consolidating and extending her hold on India.

Many of these settlements and acquisitions were no more than the formation of so many nuclei or starting centres whence the Anglo-Saxon was swiftly to extend his power over vast regions--in Australia most notably.

But despite all this nearly world-wide expansion of what we have now to begin to call the old Anglo-Saxon stock, an addition which was to prove of scarcely, if at all, less importance in the story was made to the territories of the younger branch of that stock when the United States, in 1803, purchased Louisiana.

It was of immense importance, not only because of the territory's own very considerable extent and richness, but also because it so lay, as we have seen already, as to prevent the expansion westward of the people of British race who were settled in America {181} along the shores of the Atlantic. For the Louisiana of the French was vastly more extensive than the State which now has that name. It reached up right from New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi to the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes, so that the United States were absolutely cut off from the west by this French barrier westward, and by the British Canadians northward. It was a happy circumstance for the world that this purchase was peacefully made and that Anglo-Saxons--continually strengthened, we should note, by successive immigrations of Celts from Ireland--were thus left free to fight their way to the west against the tribes of the Red Indians, and to cultivate the wild.

Those unfortunate Red Indians are to be pitied for the fate which came upon them. Again and again they combined and took savage vengeance on the pioneers of the white men who were evicting them from their age-long homes. But they had no equal chance, and step by step were driven back or tamed.

[Sidenote: Gradual expansion westward]

Limitless therefore, until the Pacific, was now the gradual expansion of the Anglo-Saxon westward, and world-wide, as we have just seen, the expansion from his ancient stock in other quarters.

But there was also another race that, all through these years of storm in Europe, was spreading itself extensively--though more from its own centre outwards, and in a less scattered manner--the Slav or Slavonic race. All round its already great circumference the Russian Empire was growing. On its immense Eastern borders were vast areas still inhabited by nomad tribes, mainly remnants of those great Tartar hordes which had been wont to sweep over all that now was Russia. Modern Russia stretched her conquering arm ever farther and farther over them till she came up against the borders of China and, in the far north-east, to the Pacific Ocean. Across the {182} Straits of Behring she joined hands in Alaska with the Anglo-Saxon when he pushed up into the extreme north-west of his new Continent: for until the United States acquired Alaska, by purchase, in 1867, it was a Russian possession. In the North of Europe Russia had won Finland from Sweden after the fighting of 1808 and 1809. In the extreme south she had been victoriously at war with Persia, and a result of that war was that the Persian province of Georgia became Russian. Also she was nearly continuously, and on the whole victoriously again, fighting with the Turk, of which fighting the general outcome was that she gained more and more territory in the Balkan region and more and more authority in those Balkan States which remained nominally independent.

And let me say now a word which will have to apply to all the rest of the story, so far as it touches these Balkan States, Danubian Principalities, and so on: that the changes which have taken place in their governments and political conditions have been so many and so quickly varied that it is quite impossible to give them place in this story. They are changes, moreover, of relatively little importance for the story as a whole. The population is almost inextricably mixed, with the Slav generally predominating. Among this mixture the Turk appears quite alien in blood, as he is in religion, and therefore it seems only natural and right, that Russia, as the leading Slav nation, with the headquarters of the Greek Church, which is the national Church of the Slav, at her southern capital city of Moscow, should extend, as she did, her sway over the Balkans and that the domination of the Turk should continually recede. Perhaps the really most interesting outcome of all this anti-Turk fighting is the independence won by Greece and acknowledged by Turkey in 1820, after some ten years of intermittent wars.

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[Sidenote: The power of Russia]

In the main we have to realise that by this date Russia had taken over what used to be Austria's part in the defence of Christendom against the Moslem Turk. Not indeed that Austria had lost importance, except, maybe, in comparison with Russia, for she had become for the moment the most important of the Teutonic States. Prussia was still her chief rival among them, but until the other German States were brought to act together under Prussia's lead Austria was singly the most powerful of them all.

In a second Persian war, Russia gained a large territory in the Caucasian district which reached right down to the borders of Armenia. The unfortunate Poland, already thrice divided, had become nominally a kingdom, but was subject to Russia's dictation, and in 1831 she was annexed by that vast and ever-increasing empire---a domination from which she has only recently been delivered as a result of the Great War.

Thus it is that, on all sides except the west, where she was up against the solid Teuton block of the German States, the great Slav monster, whose appropriate emblem was the bear, was stretching its huge grasping paws ever farther.

The Turk had suffered losses not only from Russia, and not only in Europe, but also in that land of Egypt where he had been sovereign. Napoleon had given the Turkish armies a bad battering there before the end of the eighteenth century. Now, in 1811, the Turkish power received a blow much more lastingly severe in a revolt of the Egyptians themselves. They revolted against the rule of the Mamelukes, originally a bodyguard of Turkish slaves formed to protect the sovereign of Egypt. The Mamelukes had continued to be influential in the government all through the Turkish regime. But the popular rising against them now was completely successful; they were massacred {184} without mercy, and Egypt passed into the hands of a ruler entirely independent of Turkish dominance. Under that rule she so prospered that within less than half a century she went pushing up northward, just as the old Pharaohs had thrust up thousands of years before, into Syria, and won that province also back from Turkey.

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