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 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.
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.
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.