War & Peace Quote by Emily Greene Balch

War as a social bulldozer: that’s the cold, unsentimental logic driving Balch’s line. She’s not marveling at progress; she’s naming a mechanism. The “latest” war (for her, the First World War just concluded, with its aftermath still unfolding) didn’t merely redraw borders. It liquefied an old order by making it materially impossible to maintain. Mass mobilization, requisitions, currency collapse, land hunger, and revolutionary politics didn’t politely debate feudalism out of existence; they broke its economic spine.

Her phrasing is careful and strategic. “Largely swept away what was left” acknowledges that European feudalism was already a ruin, but still powerful where it mattered: in rural landholding systems, tenancy, and aristocratic control over local institutions. “Feudal landlords” makes the target explicit. This is less about medieval legal categories than about living hierarchies: who owns the soil, who pays rent, who commands deference. By singling out Poland, Hungary, and the South East, Balch gestures toward Europe’s uneven modernity. Industrialized cores could pretend aristocracy was ornamental; agrarian peripheries still ran on it.

The subtext is a warning with a hinge of hope. If war can demolish entrenched privilege, peace must be built with equal seriousness - through deliberate reform rather than catastrophe. Balch, an educator and peace advocate, reads the postwar moment as an opening: old landlords weakened, new states forming, claims for land and rights newly legible. The sentence carries a moral charge without sermonizing: don’t romanticize the “sweep.” The price was slaughter. The lesson is leverage.