But if any one wants to appreciate the true difference, distinct from all
the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans
(who were classed together by the same newspapers a little time
before the war) let him take this single incident as a test.
Lord Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks.
Imagine Lord Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shield
of a Red Cross Knight.
It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared
no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy
was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment;
and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century
as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be
quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English
aristocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the English
aristocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simply
those of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory.
For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by far
the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades.
If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were
simply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree
with Voltaire in calling it superstition or with Villehardouin in
calling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmen
would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts.
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