Politics & Power Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line flatters maternal instinct while quietly indicting the men and institutions that treat war as policy, sport, or destiny. It’s an appealing counterfactual: put the people who do the actual human work of keeping children alive in a room together, and the machinery of slaughter would stall. The sentence is built on a soft certainty ("I am sure") and a gentle condition ("if... could meet"), which lets its radical charge slip by almost unnoticed: war persists partly because decision-makers are insulated from the cost, and because the people most proximate to that cost are politically sidelined.

The subtext is both pacifist and class-conscious in the Forster way. "Mothers" implies not just women but caretakers, domestic life, the private sphere that liberal societies sentimentalize and then exclude from public power. "Various nations" nudges nationalism into the frame as an artificial divider: the shared experience of raising a child is positioned as more real than flags, borders, and inherited resentments. The imagined meeting is diplomacy stripped of pageantry and weaponry, replacing "interests" with bodies and futures.

Context matters: Forster lived through the jingoism preceding World War I, the catastrophe itself, and the cynical rearmament that followed. His fiction and essays often distrust grand abstractions and prefer human-scale loyalties. The line works because it weaponizes sentimentality without surrendering to it, offering a moral thought experiment that exposes how unnatural war looks when viewed from the kitchen table rather than the cabinet room.