War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Root’s line has the chill of a man watching modernity industrialize violence and deciding to name the mechanism out loud. He borrows the prestige of Darwinian language not to celebrate “fitness,” but to indict what gets rewarded when societies treat war as a proving ground. “Led inevitably” is doing heavy work: it frames militarism less as a moral lapse than as a structural outcome, a kind of grim selection process. If war becomes the main arena where status is earned, then the winners will be those who can do it well - and, more dangerously, those who learn to enjoy it.

The bite is in the coupling of competence and desire. Root isn’t just worried about “men effective in war”; he’s worried about the psychological feedback loop that turns effectiveness into appetite. Loving war “because they were effective” suggests addiction, not ideology: success produces pleasure, pleasure produces repetition, repetition produces political power. That’s the subtext of “predominance” - the warriors don’t merely survive; they rise to leadership, set norms, and tilt institutions toward the conditions that validate them.

Context matters. Root, a lawyer-statesman of the Progressive Era who helped professionalize the U.S. military and advocated international arbitration, was steeped in debates about empire, preparedness, and the first waves of globalized conflict. His warning reads like an argument for constraining incentives: if you want fewer war-lovers in charge, you can’t let war be the fastest route to glory, authority, or social permission. The sentence is a critique of cultures that mistake martial success for civic fitness - and then act surprised when the most practiced fighters start writing the rules.