War & Peace Quote by Washington Irving

Irving takes the supposedly noble chaos of war and reduces it to an accountant’s rule: maximize damage, minimize cost. That chilliness is the point. By calling it the "natural principle", he smuggles brutality in as common sense, as if cruelty is just physics. The line’s real bite lands in the tidy little "of course", a rhetorical shrug that turns moral controversy into mere technique. Once you accept the premise, "stratagem" stops sounding like cowardice and starts sounding like intelligence.

The subtext is a quiet demystification of martial virtue. Irving isn’t praising heroics; he’s draining them. "Least harm to ourselves" isn’t just about casualties. It’s about political risk, public morale, treasury drains, reputational fallout - the whole national cost-benefit spreadsheet. Stratagem, then, becomes more than a battlefield trick. It’s a way to outsource suffering, to redirect violence onto others while maintaining the self-image of restraint. The sentence exposes how easily war rebrands itself: call it strategy, and the uglier parts become "efficiency."

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of the American Revolution and during an era when standing armies, territorial ambition, and modern statecraft were hardening into norms, Irving is voicing an early 19th-century realism: nations don’t win by being gallant; they win by being shrewd. His phrasing anticipates the modern logic of "surgical" force and remote advantage - the persistent fantasy that you can wage war cleanly, so long as you’re clever enough.