ch in the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was checked.[2]
The observation of Waitz is just, but a change in environment develops
the latent qualities of a race. The restless and melancholy surge, the
wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea exalted the imagination of
the Viking as the desert the imagination of the Arab. Not the cry of
"New lands" merely, but the adventurous heart of his race, lured on by
the magic of the sea, its receding horizons, its danger and its change,
spread the fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the basilicas, the
marbles, and the thronging palaces of Byzantium to the solitary
homestead set in the English forest-clearing, or in the wastes of
Ireland which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly reclaiming. To
the glamour of war for its own sake the Crusades brought the
transforming power of a new ideal. The cry "_Deus vult!_" at Clermont
marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transition from the type of
Alaric and Chlodovech, of Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and
Tancred, Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas and the
war-songs of the northern skalds to the chivalrous verse of the
troubadours, a Bertrand or a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the
crusades which transfigures at moments the prose of William of Tyre or
of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of Joinville.

The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of the origin of war as
an explanation of war, and the enumeration by historians of causes and
results in territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that
indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia which, as Tacitus
affirms, lies in wait to mar all high endeavour--"Subit quippe etiam
ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."

The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their apparent origin,
reveal in their course their true origin in the heart of the race, the
consciousness of the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic
kindred, amongst the nations of the earth. If ever there were a race
which seemed destined to found a world-empire by the sword it is the
Hebrew. They make war with Roman relentlessness and with more than
Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts guiding their march or their
retreat by day and by night ceaselessly. Every battle is a Lake
Regillus, and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah Sabaoth that
nerves the right arm of his faithful. The forms of Gideon and Joshua,
though on a na