War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

There is a hard-edged realism hiding inside Root's polite diction: peace is not a social club, and good intentions are not a governing strategy. By calling peace advocacy a "mere assemblage" and "mere exhortation", he is stripping the movement of its comforting self-image. The repetition of "mere" functions like a legal brief in miniature, narrowing the claims of moral persuasion until they look procedural, even flimsy. Root is not attacking peace as an aim; he is prosecuting peace talk as insufficient evidence.

The intent is managerial, almost technocratic. Root, a lawyer and statesman of the U.S. establishment, lived in an era when international arbitration, The Hague conferences, and the first architecture of global order were taking shape - and when that architecture repeatedly failed to restrain imperial rivalry and militarization. In that context, his impatience reads less like cynicism than institutional critique: the public can be convinced and still be irrelevant if treaties, courts, enforcement mechanisms, and credible deterrence are missing.

Subtext: pacifism that flatters itself with rhetoric risks becoming a kind of moral theater. Root is warning that a politics of persuasion can be a substitute for the slower, less glamorous work of building rules and constraints that bind states when emotions shift and interests harden. He also signals a classically legal suspicion of crowds and sentiments: argument is cheap; structures are expensive.

The line works because it punctures a comforting fantasy. It insists that peace is not a mood to be cultivated but a system to be engineered - and that without institutions, "peace in general" is just an attractive abstraction.