Mr. Macdonald.  If a lunatic believes in his luck so fixedly as to feel sure be cannot be caught, he will not only believe in it still, but believe in it more and more, until the actual instant when he is caught.  The longer the chase, the more certain he will be of escaping; the more narrow the escapes, the more certain will be the escape.  And indeed if he does escape it will seem a miracle, and almost a divine intervention, not only to the pursued but to the pursuers.  The evil thing will chiefly appear unconquerable to those who try to conquer it.  It will seem after all to have a secret of success; and those who failed against it will hide in their hearts a secret of failure.  It was that secret of failure, I fancy, that slowly withered from within the high hopes of the Middle Ages.  Christianity and chivalry had measured their force against Mahound, and Mahound had not fallen; the shadow of his horned helmet, the crest of the Crescent, still lay across their sunnier lands; the Horns of Hattin.  The streams of life that flowed to guilds and schools and orders of knighthood and brotherhoods of friars were strangely changed and chilled.  So, if the peace had left Prussianism secure even in Prussia, I believe that all the liberal ideals of the Latins, and all the liberties of the English, and the whole theory of a democratic experiment in America, would have begun to die of a deep and even subconscious despair.  A vote, a jury, a newspaper, would not be as they are, things of which it is hard to make the right use, or any use; they would be things of which nobody would even try to make any use.  A vote would actually look like a vassal’s cry of “haro,” a jury would look like a joust; many would no more read headlines than blazon heraldic coats.  For these medieval things look dead and dusty because of a defeat, which was none the less a defeat because it was more than half a victory.

A curious cloud of confusion rests on the details of that defeat.  The Christian captains who acted in it were certainly men on a different moral level from the good Duke Godfrey; their characters were by comparison mixed and even mysterious.  Perhaps the two determining personalities were Raymond of Tripoli, a skilful soldier whom his enemies seemed to have accused of being much too skilful a diplomatist; and Renaud of Chatillon, a violent adventurer whom his enemies seem to have accused of being little better than a bandit.  And it is the irony of the incident that Raymond got into trouble for making a dubious peace with the Saracens, while Renaud got into trouble by making an equally dubious war on the Saracens.  Renaud exacted from Moslem travellers on a certain road what he regarded as a sort of feudal toll or tax, and they regarded as a brigand ransom; and when they did not pay he attacked them.  This was regarded as a breach of the truce; but probably it would have been easier to regard Renaud as waging the war of a robber, if many had not regarded Raymond as having