War & Peace Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith’s line has the blunt, rallying cadence of a pamphlet meant to stiffen the spine of the hesitant. “Surely” does a lot of work: it poses as common sense, pre-empting objections by treating courage as the only rational option. The sentence is built on an old political trick - redefine prudence as cowardice. To “meet the enemy… head on in the field” isn’t just a tactical preference; it’s a moral posture, a claim that the proper place for conflict is public, orderly, and controlled. Waiting “till they plunder our very homes” conjures the opposite: humiliation, intimacy violated, violence no longer containable.

The subtext is anxiety about delay and division. Goldsmith frames time itself as an accomplice to invasion: hesitation becomes consent, domestic safety a temporary illusion. “Our very homes” is deliberately possessive and close-range, shifting the stakes from abstract territory to hearth and family - a pressure point that turns national defense into personal responsibility.

Contextually, Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century Britain nervous about external threats and internal complacency, when war felt less like distant strategy and more like a test of civic character. As a poet, he understands that arguments don’t move people as efficiently as images do. “Plunder” is vivid, almost cinematic, and it sneaks in a class-neutral terror: whatever you own, it can be taken. The line works because it offers a single, clean alternative to panic - fight now, on chosen ground - while quietly admitting how fragile “home” actually is.