War & Peace Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt skewers a perennial national pastime: militant certainty built on fog. By borrowing Defoe’s jab about “a hundred thousand country fellows” eager to die opposing “popery,” Hazlitt isn’t really interested in Catholic doctrine; he’s diagnosing how mass politics recruits emotion first and comprehension never. The joke lands because “popery” is both an ideology and a convenient monster-word. Hazlitt turns it into a slapstick object - “a man or a horse” - to expose how slogans can detach entirely from content while still commanding lethal loyalty.

The intent is contempt, but it’s strategic contempt. Hazlitt writes as a critic in an England where anti-Catholicism had been institutional habit: the lingering aftermath of the Reformation, periodic “No Popery” panics, and the long lead-up to Catholic Emancipation (1829). “Country fellows” signals more than geography; it points to a class imagined as politically mobilizable and intellectually disposable. Hazlitt’s target isn’t rural life so much as the elite machinery that manufactures panic and then congratulates itself on patriotic vigor.

Subtext: intolerance thrives not on theological argument but on the pleasure of belonging to a righteous crowd. The line implies that prejudice is most powerful when it’s abstract, when the enemy is a sound rather than a substance. Hazlitt’s cynicism is modern: he’s watching identity politics before the term existed - the conversion of complicated history into a single hissed syllable, ready for banners, riots, and moral self-regard.