War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Root is politely calling the peace industry naive. His sentence flatters “civilization” while quietly insisting it’s a thin veneer: diplomacy, arbitration, and international law can only reach the part of humans that wants to be reached. War, he argues, doesn’t begin as a legal dispute; it erupts from older wiring - status panic, tribal loyalty, revenge, appetite for dominance - the stuff that doesn’t show up in treaties.

The intent is strategic. As a lawyer and statesman of the early 20th century, Root was one of the architects of rules-based internationalism (he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912). Yet he’s warning fellow reformers that paper institutions won’t restrain blood-and-soil impulses on their own. It’s a hard-nosed brief for power politics inside a moral argument: if peace appeals only to reason and refinement, then it must be backed by deterrence, preparedness, and domestic discipline. The “limitation” isn’t technical; it’s anthropological.

The subtext cuts two ways. First, it’s a rebuke to the era’s optimistic belief that modernization automatically pacifies nations. Second, it smuggles a hierarchy: “civilized” versus “savage” reads as a psychological claim, but in Root’s time it also echoed imperial assumptions about which peoples were fit for self-rule and which required “order.” That double meaning gives the line its bite. Root frames war as a relapse into primal behavior, forcing the reader to confront an uncomfortable possibility: peace isn’t humanity’s default setting; it’s a political achievement that has to outmuscle our oldest instincts.