Peace Quote by William Watson

There is something almost daring about making a calm prediction of disarmament in a world that reliably rewards paranoia. Watson’s phrasing leans on the authority of personal conviction ("Personally, I do not believe") rather than evidence, a rhetorical move that signals both humility and quiet insistence: he’s not issuing a policy memo, he’s trying to normalize a different emotional posture. The sentence is built to sound reasonable, even inevitable. "On the contrary" flips the expected script, and "gradual diminution" is deliberately bloodless language - a technocratic tapering rather than a moral crusade. That restraint is the point: it sells peace as a process, not a miracle.

The subtext is optimistic, but it’s also defensive. By arguing against "greater armaments", Watson is implicitly acknowledging the era’s baseline assumption: that the future is an arms race by default. His bet on decline functions like a counter-spell against that fatalism. It also avoids the messier claim that people will become better; instead, it suggests societies will simply become less armed over time, as if maturity in international affairs is a kind of administrative evolution.

Context matters because this reads like a voice from the long pre- and post-World War debates over militarism, arbitration, and the cost of empire. It captures a recurring modern temptation: to treat history as a curve that naturally bends toward restraint, when the 20th century repeatedly showed how quickly that curve can snap.