Time & Perspective Quote by John Woolman

Woolman writes like a man trying to make violence visible to people who prefer it abstract. “Breaking in” is the key phrase: invasion framed not as strategy or glory but as a violation of home life, an uninvited boot through the door. He stacks consequences in a grim cascade - land “laid waste,” bodies “perished,” then the longer, quieter ruin of those “pressed with poverty and grief.” The sentence is built to deny the reader an exit ramp. Even if you can look away from the dead, you still have to live with the social wreckage.

As an 18th-century Quaker clergyman, Woolman’s intent isn’t to score rhetorical points; it’s to prick the conscience of a society making money off coercion. His era is thick with imperial war and colonial expansion, with ordinary British and American settlers benefiting from distant campaigns, dispossession, and the militarized enforcement of trade. Woolman refuses the euphemisms that let comfort coexist with cruelty. “Flourishing countries” is a subtle rebuke to the myth that war only happens “over there” to places already doomed; it happens to places that look, uncomfortably, like ours.

The subtext is accusation without naming names: if you profit from systems that require “merciless armies” - through commerce, taxation, political loyalty - you are implicated in the afterlife of conflict: the poverty, the grief, the destabilized communities. Woolman’s moral logic is radical precisely because it’s practical. He isn’t arguing about abstract sin; he’s tracing the supply chain of suffering.