War & Peace Quote by Frank B. Kellogg

Kellogg frames the arms race as a double crime: a quiet domestic mugging and a loud international provocation. By pairing “terrible burden upon the people” with “one of the greatest menaces to the peace of the world,” he links tax receipts to battlefield casualties, insisting that militarization doesn’t merely prepare for war - it actively manufactures the conditions for it. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost prosecutorial. “Competition” is the key euphemism he refuses to romanticize; it’s not “security” or “defense,” it’s a contest of prestige and paranoia, the kind where every new battleship is both a symbol of strength and a signal that you expect the worst.

The subtext is aimed at democracies tempted to treat armaments as an industrial policy or patriotic sport. Kellogg reminds listeners that the bill is paid by ordinary citizens long before any enemy appears, and that the political incentives of buildup (jobs, contracts, national pride) can outmuscle the abstract promise of restraint. His “I believe” reads less like uncertainty than a strategic softening - a politician’s way of making a blunt claim sound reasonable, inviting coalition rather than backlash from hawks.

Context matters: coming out of World War I, when naval and artillery escalation had helped turn Europe into a slaughterhouse, “land and naval” lands as a catalog of recent horrors. As U.S. Secretary of State and architect of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, he was selling an anti-war internationalism that tried to replace arms competition with norms and treaties. The quote’s power is its refusal to separate household economics from global catastrophe: the same engine drives both.