bouts and the customary concern with wars, gambling and the chase were forgotten in this interest in a new and different kind of enterprise. Given the right impulse, at the right moment, nothing is easier than to convert a mass of men into potential heroes, and the inspiration was at hand. Abandoning hearth and home, the bench and the ploughshare, castle as well as cottage, ease as readily as penury, vast aggregations of men — and not a few women — issued forth into an unknown world bristling with many perils. Never before nor since has there been such a spontaneous and wholesale plunge into wild adventure. A French writer of the Eighteenth Century, moved perhaps by the polite cynicism of his time, asserted that different motives inspired these original soldiers of the Red Cross (the Crusader wore a red cross on his right shoulder), and proceeded to attribute far from altruistic impulses to the most of them. " The leaders looked for glory and lands, the bishops for increased attention and deference, the common people for liberty and plunder, the monks to violate without sin their vows to God because of their new vows to rescue the Cross. Some simple souls were sincerely animated with the desire to deliver the Holy Land." This is to ignore the existing conditions, which made it quite possible and even logical for self-seeking and even worse vices to cling like barnacles to unquestioning faith and devotion. It will not do to view the conscience of the Dark Ages through the magnifying