War & Peace Quote by Robert Walpole

Walpole is doing something deceptively modern here: conceding the uglier logic of politics in order to police its limits. By calling a "party war" both reasonable and necessary, he legitimizes factional conflict as a feature of governance, not a regrettable glitch. That’s a hard-nosed admission from the man often tagged as Britain’s first prime minister, operating in a Parliament where patronage, press attacks, and shifting alliances were not side-shows but the machinery itself.

The intent is prophylactic. Walpole isn’t pleading for harmony; he’s arguing for rules of engagement. The phrasing matters: "I will not attempt to deny" reads like a courtroom move, a preemptive disarming of critics who might accuse him of naivete or hypocrisy. Then he pivots to the real target: escalation. "In carrying on that war" suggests that conflict, once authorized, tends to metastasize. The subtext is a warning to his own side as much as to opponents: don’t let winning become a license to abandon legitimacy.

What makes the line work is its moral boundary-setting without moral grandstanding. He invokes "principles and rules of justice" as institutional guardrails, not private virtue. In an era when party identity was hardening and power could be exercised through selective prosecutions, bribery, and procedural ambush, Walpole frames justice as the condition that keeps political struggle from tipping into state-sanctioned revenge. It’s realism with a leash: you can fight, he says, but if you burn down the idea of fairness, you won’t just defeat your rivals - you’ll undermine the system that makes any victory worth having.