They came from Central
Asia, on a late wave of that big "Westward ho!" movement of the Eastern
peoples, a race of shepherds changed into an army of mounted archers, and
pitched their tents first in Galieia, uniting their seven tribes under
the great chief Arpad; but, harassed continually by local tribes with
unpronounceable names, they moved farther westwards to their present
quarters, where, after a vain but spirited attempt to annex Europe
generally, they settled down to comfort and civilisation, ceased to offer
white horses to idols, and embraced Christianity.
It seems that land-thieves are called conquerors; and after a thousand
years of possession of their stolen goods, the glamour of a divine
sanctity gets over the past, and high-minded natives live and die for the
country which seems to have been theirs from time immemorial, and in
which their holiest feelings are enrooted. What makes national robberies
moral is the fact that there is honour among the thieves. The morality of
crowds is, in fact, as different from that of individuals as "the
psychology of crowds" which has just engaged the attention of an
ingenious scientist. Into the original conquerors of a country a
miscellaneous assortment of other races always gets absorbed, as the
Franks by the Gauls, the Turkish Bulgarians by the Slavs.
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