eligious retreats of infidels. When any city fell into their hands
there was wholesale assassination. And they became licentious, as well
as rapacious and cruel. They learned all the vices of the East. Even
under the walls of Acre they sang to the sounds of Arabian instruments,
and danced amid indecent songs. When they took Constantinople they had
no respect for either churches or tombs, and desecrated even the pulpit
of the Patriarch. Their original religious zeal was finally lost sight
of entirely in their military license. They became more hateful to the
orthodox Greeks than to the infidel Saracens. And when the crusaders
returned to their homes,--what few of them lived to return,--they
morally poisoned the communities and villages in which they dwelt. They
became vagabonds and vagrants; they introduced demoralizing amusements,
and jugglers and strolling players appeared for the first time in
Europe. All war is necessarily demoralizing, even war in defence of
glorious principles, and especially in these times, but much more so is
unjust, fanatical, and unnecessary war.

But I turn from the record of the mistakes, follies, vices, miseries,
and crimes which marked the wickedest and most uncalled-for wars of
European history, to consider their ultimate results: not logical
results, for these were melancholy,--the depopulation of Europe; the
decimation of the nobility; the poverty which enormous drains of money
from their natural channels produced; the spread of vice; the decline of
even feudal virtues. These evils and others followed naturally and
inevitably from those distant wars. The immediate effects of all war are
evil and melancholy. Murder, pillage, profanity, drunkenness,
extravagance, public distress, bitter sorrows, wasted energies,
destruction of property, national debts, exaltation of military maxims,
general looseness of life, distaste for regular pursuits,--these are the
first-fruits of war, offensive and defensive, and as inevitable and
uniform as the laws of gravity. No wars were ever more disastrous than
the Crusades in their immediate effects, in any way they may be viewed.
It is all one dark view of disappointment, sorrow, wretchedness, and
sin. There were no bright spots; no gains, only calamities. Nothing
consoled Europe for the loss of five millions of her most able-bodied
men,--no increase of territory, no establishment of rights, no glory,
even; nothing but disgrace and ruin, as in that maddest of