The Greatest Story in the World, Period 3 by Horace G. Hutchinson

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.