The Seven Years' War had been in large measure brought about by a rather similar design against Prussia and Poland seems to have been one of the consenting parties, if not an active partaker, in that proposed robbery. Now a robbery yet more audacious was not only proposed but actually perpetrated upon her. She was powerless to resist; though there had been a time when she was a great power and {135} Russia was scarcely heard of, Austria no more than the boundary buffer state between the Teuton and the Slav, and Prussia of no account whatever in the story. This first partition was followed by a second and yet a third rather more than twenty years afterwards. By that latest division she was almost wholly swallowed up in Russia and ceased to exist as an independent State until her comparatively recent resuscitation. [Sidenote: Expansion of Russia] On whatever side we now look of the boundaries of Russia we see them continuously extending. Her armies defeat the Tartars eastward, the Turks southward; she destroys a large Turkish fleet; she gains the extensive region called White Russia, and the Crimea, and sends conquering armies into the Balkan States, where the Bulgarian Slavs are establishing themselves ever more firmly as an independent nation. Largely it is by reason of the growing power of Russia that the Turks, are more and more compelled to fight for their existence and for their hold on even a part of their wide conquests in Europe. They are no longer fighting to extend them. And at the same time, that is to say, in 1768, Egypt, under the Mamelukes, throws off the domination of the Ottomans. Originally these Mamelukes themselves were Turkish--a bodyguard of Turkish slaves enrolled for the protection of the Egyptian rulers. They had revolted and seized the government soon after the reign of Saladin. And it is worthy of note that in the midst of all the fighting which goes on in and around the Balkans between Venetians, Turks, Russians, and others, the little mountain State of Montenegro always retains her independence. Though often attacked, she is never subdued. Her story may remind us of those valiant and invincible Swiss, for doubtless it is because of the mountainous character of the two countries alike, giving the defence such a great advantage over the {136} attack, that the heroic defenders of both kept their homeland free against enemies whose numbers were many times greater than their own.