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.
{183}
[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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