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.