Daily Inspiration Quote by Elihu Root

Root’s sentence reads like a courtroom brief for the international order: if you can’t yet compel states with a global police force, you can still corner them with shame. Calling it the “line of least resistance” is the tell. Civilization doesn’t advance, in Root’s view, by heroic leaps of moral enlightenment; it advances by choosing the cheapest available lever that still moves power. That lever is “the world’s public opinion,” treated not as a soft chorus of sentiments but as a “continually increasing force” - an instrument that can make a “theoretical postulate” (think: arbitration over war, rights over raw sovereignty) behave like reality.

The subtext is a pragmatic lawyer’s impatience with idealism that stays ideal. Root isn’t romantic about human nature; he’s strategic about incentives. If you can’t prosecute aggression, you can delegitimize it. If you can’t bind nations with statutes, you can bind them with reputation. It’s a vision of law without a sovereign: norms as pressure, consensus as constraint, legitimacy as currency.

Context matters. Root wrote in an era when the U.S. was becoming a global actor, war was being “civilized” on paper (Hague conventions, arbitration movements), and international institutions were still prototypes. His syntax mirrors that moment: grand talk (“civilization”) yoked to procedural mechanics (“postulate,” “force”). The intent is nation-building at the planetary scale, not through utopian brotherhood but through the slow conversion of moral claims into enforceable expectations - the kind that make leaders calculate not only what they can do, but what they can get away with.