In Spain they had been victorious; but their castle was not even a castle in Spain.  It was a castle east of the sun and west of the moon, and the fairy prince could find it no more.  Indeed that idle image out of the nursery books fits it very exactly.  For its mystery was and is in standing in the middle, or as they said in the very centre of the earth.  It is east of the sun of Europe, which fills the world with a daylight of sanity, and ripens real and growing things.  It is west of the moon of Asia, mysterious and archaic with its cold volcanoes, silver mirror for poets and a most fatal magnet for lunatics.

Anyhow the fall of Jerusalem, and in that sense the failure of the Crusades, had a widespread effect, as I should myself suggest, for the reason I have myself suggested.  Because it had been a popular movement, it was a popular disappointment; and because it had been a popular movement, its ideal was an image; a particular picture in the imagination.  For poor men are almost always particularists; and nobody has ever seen such a thing as a mob of pantheists.  I have seen in some of that lost literature of the old guilds, which is now everywhere coming to light, a list of the stage properties required for some village play, one of those popular plays acted by the medieval trades unions, for which the guild of the shipwrights would build Noah’s Ark or the guild of the barbers provide golden wigs for the haloes of the Twelve Apostles.  The list of those crude pieces of stage furniture had a curious colour of poetry about it, like the impromptu apparatus of a nursery charade; a cloud, an idol with a club, and notably among the rest, the walls and towers of Jerusalem.  I can imagine them patiently painted and gilded as a special feature, like the two tubs of Mr. Vincent Crummles.  But I can also imagine that towards the end of the Middle Ages, the master of the revels might begin to look at those towers of wood and pasteboard with a sort of pain, and perhaps put them away in a corner, as a child will tire of a toy especially if it is associated with a disappointment or a dismal misunderstanding.  There is noticeable in some of the later popular poems a disposition to sulk about the Crusades.  But though the popular feeling had been largely poetical, the same thing did in its degree occur in the political realm that was purely practical.  The Moslem had been checked, but he had not been checked enough.  The whole story of what was called the Eastern Question, and three-quarters of the wars of the modern world, were due to the fact that he was not checked enough.

The only thing to do with unconquerable things is to conquer them.  That alone will cure them of invincibility; or what is worse, their own vision of invincibility.  That was the conviction of those of us who would not accept what we considered a premature peace with Prussia.  That is why we would not listen either to the Tory Pro-Germanism of Lord Lansdowne or the Socialist Pro-Germanism of