But as we know what the Crusaders meant better than they did themselves, I cannot quite understand why we do not enjoy the same valuable omniscience about the Americans.

Indeed I do not see why we should not enjoy it (for it would be very enjoyable) about any individual American.
Surely it was this vague vagabond spirit that moved Mr.Pound, not only to come to England, but in a fashion to come to Fleet Street.
A dim tribal tendency, vast and invisible as the wind, carried him and his article like an autumn leaf to alight on the _New Age_ doorstep.
Or a blind aboriginal impulse, wholly without rational motive, led him one day to put on his hat, and go out with his article in an envelope and put it in a pillar-box.

It is vain to correct by cold logic the power of such primitive appetites; nature herself was behind the seemingly random thoughtlessness of the deed.
And now that it is irrevocably done, he can look back on it and trace the large lines of an awful law of averages; wherein it is ruled by a ruthless necessity that a certain number of such Americans should write a certain number of such articles, as the leaves fall or the flowers return.
In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man.

It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation.
It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg.

Or it is as if I were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore.
I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is because the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory to swim on the land.