War & Peace Quote by Lady Gregory

A toothbrush is doing heavy class warfare here. Lady Gregory’s line snaps with the kind of social comedy that doesn’t bother pretending the stakes are noble: the “old battle” isn’t ideology versus ideology, it’s habit versus habit, hygiene as a shorthand for who counts as “civilized.” The joke lands because it’s simultaneously petty and brutal. Toothbrushing is intimate, mundane, almost laughably small-scale; turning it into an eternal conflict exposes how quickly societies convert trivial markers into moral rankings.

As a dramatist embedded in the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and central to the Irish Literary Revival, Gregory understood that culture wars rarely announce themselves as culture wars. They arrive disguised as standards: proper speech, proper manners, proper cleanliness. In colonial and postcolonial Ireland, those standards were not neutral. “Those who use a toothbrush” evokes the tidy self-image of the educated, Anglicized, respectable class; “those who don’t” conjures the caricature of the rustic, the poor, the “backward” Irish - a stereotype long used to justify patronizing governance and social exclusion.

The line’s intent is double-edged. It can be read as a sly confession of elite prejudice, or as a satirical jab at it, depending on who’s speaking in the dramatic situation. Either way, it works because it compresses an entire system of power into a bathroom object: the politics of belonging reduced to bristles and spit, making the arbitrariness of the boundary impossible to ignore.