great political and religious movements by which man
has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect
in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change.
The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly
rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement.
I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for
a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps
generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it
is irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not.

It is not enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity,
which causes most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the fact
that religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic war.
I for one have often defended and even encouraged patriotic war,
and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion.
But it cannot be denied that there is more of mere passion,
of mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere personal accident,
in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith.
The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modern
conscript or professional soldier. He is more rational in
his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object
of conversion; where the modern militarist has an object much
more confused by momentary vanity and one-sided satisfaction.
The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town;
but the Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town.
He has only a healthy hatred of it as a Prussian town.
The Moslem wished to make the Christian a Moslem; but even
the Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian.
He only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian;
and not only were the means he adopted somewhat ill-considered for
this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational.
The object of all war is peace; but the object of religious
war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement.
In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national
war aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sort
of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.

In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer
at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place,
when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put
across a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who she