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 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.
CHAPTER XV
STEAM AND EVOLUTION
The realisation of the power of steam, and its application to machinery, have made a greater difference in this Greatest Story than any other single event that ever happened in it before or since. It is a realisation that came just before the end of the eighteenth century, and it made a greater difference between the story of the nineteenth century and that of all the centuries before it than there ever had been between any two former periods. That is indeed a large claim to make for it, but it is none too large.
Hitherto, the force that man had made use of to do his work had been, with few exceptions, the force of his own muscles or those of his horses or oxen. He had used the winds to blow his ships along. He had used both wind and water to turn his corn-grinding mills. He had used explosive gunpowder to propel his missiles. Earlier still, he had used the resilient force of wood, for his bows, to shoot his arrows, and this was perhaps his first use of the forces of Nature which surrounded him and which he, like everything else, without knowing it, obeyed. But now, all at once, he discovered the use of another exceedingly strong force, in steam. The real wealth of the world consists more truly in man's power to control and turn to his own use the forces of Nature than in anything else. Hitherto he had possessed scarcely any of this true wealth, because his force was limited by the muscular power of himself and his domestic animals. Now he had a servant whose power to do work for him was almost without limit. The steam-engine was invented.
When we speak of a steam-engine the first idea it brings to mind is a locomotive engine drawing a train or driving a ship; but it was not to this that the steam-engine was turned on its first invention, nor is it perhaps its most important use.