War & Peace Quote by Thomas Hood

A poet borrowing the cold grammar of political philosophy can feel like a costume change mid-play, and that friction is the point. Hood’s line stages a bargain: peace is not a vibe, it’s a trade. The “right to all things” is the fantasy of total personal entitlement, the default setting of scarcity and fear. Hood asks what it costs to exit that state without pretending human nature has been remodeled. You don’t become virtuous; you become conditional. “When others are so too” is the key clause, the little tripwire that admits how fragile civilization is. Restraint isn’t a solo performance; it’s a synchronized one.

The prose is intentionally legalistic. “As far forth,” “defence,” “shall think it necessary” - these are hedges, not flourishes. They dramatize the psychological reality behind social contracts: we agree to limits, but we keep one hand on the emergency brake. Liberty here isn’t romantic freedom; it’s measured toleration, calibrated to what you’re willing to grant back. That reciprocity turns morality into a mirror test: your maximum freedom is bounded by the freedom you can stand to see in someone else.

Context matters: early-19th-century Britain was living through industrial churn, political agitation, and the ever-present memory of revolutionary upheaval across the Channel. Hood, often read for wit and pathos, channels a harder civic lesson: peace isn’t secured by good feelings but by mutual surrender, carefully rationed, always contingent, and still worth choosing because the alternative is everyone’s “all things” colliding at once.