They were proved wrong, and they were right.  They were judged finally and forgotten, and they were right.  Centuries after their fall the full experience and development of political discovery has shown beyond question that they were right.  For there is a very simple test of the truth; that the very thing which was dismissed, as a dream of the ages of faith, we have been forced to turn into a fact in the ages of fact.  It is now more certain than it ever was before that Europe must rescue some lordship, or overlordship, of these old Roman provinces.  Whether it is wise for England alone to claim Palestine, whether it would be better if the Entente could do so, I think a serious question.  But in some form they are reverting for the Roman Empire.  Every opportunity has been given for any other empire that could be its equal, and especially for the great dream of a mission for Imperial Islam.  If ever a human being had a run for his money, it was the Sultan of the Moslems riding on his Arab steed.  His empire expanded over and beyond the great Greek empire of Byzantium; a last charge of the chivalry of Poland barely stopped it at the very gates of Vienna.  He was free to unfold everything that was in him, and he unfolded the death that was in him.  He reigned and he could not rule; he was successful and he did not succeed.  His baffled and retreating enemies left him standing, and he could not stand.  He fell finally with that other half-heathen power in the North, with which he had made an alliance against the remains of Roman and Byzantine culture.  He fell because barbarism cannot stand; because even when it succeeds it rather falls on its foes and crushes them.  And after all these things, after all these ages, with a wearier philosophy, with a heavier heart, we have been forced to do again the very thing that the Crusaders were derided for doing.  What Western men failed to do for the faith, other Western men have been forced to do even without the faith.  The sons of Tancred are again in Tripoli.  The heirs of Raymond are again in Syria.  And men from the Midlands or the Northumbrian towns went again through a furnace of thirst and fever and furious fighting, to gain the same water-courses and invest the same cities as of old.  They trod the hills of Galilee and the Horns of Hattin threw no shadow on their souls; they crossed dark and disastrous fields whose fame had been hidden from them, and avenged the fathers they had forgotten.  And the most cynical of modern diplomatists, making their settlement by the most sceptical of modern philosophies, can find no practical or even temporary solution for this sacred land, except to bring it again under the crown of Coeur de Lion and the cross of St. George.