War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Peace, Root suggests, isn’t usually torpedoed by officials twirling mustaches; it’s eroded by a public that confuses grievance with virtue. The line is built on a quiet reversal of the civics-class story: governments, often painted as the natural warmongers, are shown “straining every nerve to keep the peace,” while “the people whom they represent” supply the heat that turns disputes into crusades. Root’s language is legalistic but pointed. “Patriotic enthusiasm” sits beside “resentment,” as if pride and anger are co-dependent emotions, easily recruited for the same project. And the phrase “real or fancied wrongs” is the scalpel: policy gets driven not only by facts but by narratives, rumors, and the intoxicating need to feel insulted on behalf of the nation.

The intent is cautionary, aimed at democracies where legitimacy depends on public mood. Root is warning that representative government doesn’t automatically restrain conflict; it can amplify it. Leaders who want to de-escalate still have to survive elections, newspapers, and the social reward system that treats hawkishness as loyalty and compromise as weakness. “Urging them forward” implies pressure, not persuasion: crowds don’t merely consent to war; they hustle reluctant institutions toward it.

Context matters. Root came of age in an America learning to operate as a global power and lived through the fever politics surrounding imperial expansion and World War I. As a lawyer and statesman, he understood that international order isn’t only a matter of treaties; it’s a matter of mass psychology. His subtext is bleakly modern: the shortest path to war is often a story the public can’t stop repeating.