"The question whether the long effort to put an end to war can succeed without another major convulsion challenges not only our minds but our sense of responsibility"
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Balch frames peace not as a moral poster slogan but as a stress test of adulthood. Her pivot from “minds” to “sense of responsibility” is the tell: the real battleground isn’t only strategy or diplomacy, it’s whether societies can accept the boring, grinding obligations that make war less likely. “Long effort” rejects the fantasy of a single treaty or charismatic leader; peace is infrastructure, built over decades, maintained by institutions and habits that don’t photograph well.
The knife in the sentence is “without another major convulsion.” Balch is speaking from a world that had already watched modern war industrialize suffering. The line carries the dread that catastrophe is the default engine of reform: nations change only after they’re broken. She’s challenging that fatalism. Can humans learn prophylactically, or do we require trauma to recalibrate? The subtext is an indictment of political complacency and public appetite for dramatic turning points. If peace arrives only after “convulsion,” then it’s less a triumph of reason than a byproduct of ruin.
As an educator and internationalist (and later a Nobel Peace Prize laureate), Balch’s context is early 20th-century pacifism wrestling with realism: the rise of militarism, the fragility of leagues and conferences, the temptation to treat war as inevitable. Her sentence is designed to shame inevitability without naivete. It asks readers to feel implicated: if preventing war is “long,” then citizens, not just statesmen, are on the hook for patience, civic pressure, and the unglamorous work of cooperation before the next crisis makes the choice for them.
The knife in the sentence is “without another major convulsion.” Balch is speaking from a world that had already watched modern war industrialize suffering. The line carries the dread that catastrophe is the default engine of reform: nations change only after they’re broken. She’s challenging that fatalism. Can humans learn prophylactically, or do we require trauma to recalibrate? The subtext is an indictment of political complacency and public appetite for dramatic turning points. If peace arrives only after “convulsion,” then it’s less a triumph of reason than a byproduct of ruin.
As an educator and internationalist (and later a Nobel Peace Prize laureate), Balch’s context is early 20th-century pacifism wrestling with realism: the rise of militarism, the fragility of leagues and conferences, the temptation to treat war as inevitable. Her sentence is designed to shame inevitability without naivete. It asks readers to feel implicated: if preventing war is “long,” then citizens, not just statesmen, are on the hook for patience, civic pressure, and the unglamorous work of cooperation before the next crisis makes the choice for them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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