Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked.  But as a matter of history it had been attacked.  The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy.  The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded.  They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.  They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.  There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference.  The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain.  In short it was something which must happen in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so.  Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically, they proceeded to deal with it equally practically.  The first division involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last developments followed out every principle of the science of war.  The Crusade was the counter-attack.  It was the defensive army taking the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base.  And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act, that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wandering of an animal.  But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential to consider.  To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly, in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill’s introduction of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks.  Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their own actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason, and it is a perfectly reasonable reason?

I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history to the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity for the medieval simplicity.  But just as the German Hospice after all stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building, so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous, which the German historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possibly have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said.  There is indeed one respect in which the