de 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 case of the Crusade does
differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition
or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities
as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through
the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience
of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police.
It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be
what these critics mean. But the difference is not in the evolutionary,
but rather the revolutionary spirit.

The First Crusade was not a racial migration; it was something much
more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand this
religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of history
as with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly
on a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar
evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution,
but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them.
The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that it
was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal.
In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like
democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling
the movement of a mass of angry men is regarded as no better than
a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists
call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it
the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly
worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle.
In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively
mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects.
Nevertheless we m