War & Peace Quote by Charles Farrar Browne

It lands like a patriotic pledge, then twists the knife: the sacrifices are always someone else’s. Charles Farrar Browne - better known as Artemus Ward, a master of deadpan American burlesque - uses the diction of civic virtue (“stand ready,” “sacrifice”) to expose how easily war-talk becomes a performance when the costs can be outsourced. The joke is structurally simple and morally corrosive: he’s “given” two cousins already, so he’s earned the right to offer up a third body, conveniently adjacent but not attached to him.

The intent isn’t just to mock warmongers; it’s to puncture the era’s grand rhetoric by showing its transactional underbelly. “Sacrifice” is a sacred word in wartime, meant to imply shared suffering and noble necessity. Browne keeps the word but swaps its object: not “my life,” not “my son,” but “my wife’s brother,” a relationship that sounds almost like a loophole. The line suggests a speaker who treats kinship as a buffer zone, measuring distance from danger the way a politician measures polling risk.

Context matters. Browne wrote during the Civil War, when public life was saturated with calls to duty and honor, and when exempting oneself from service was a real, resented privilege. His satire captures a durable American type: the armchair patriot, eager for moral credit, allergic to personal cost. The punchline isn’t merely funny; it’s an accusation delivered in a grin, reminding readers that public virtue collapses when it’s built on private exemptions.