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.