Peace Quote by Charles E. Trevelyan

A bureaucrat’s sentence that reads like a polite indictment. Trevelyan’s phrasing is surgical: the ruling classes do not merely accept nationalism as a fact of life; they "nourish" it, cultivating hatred the way a careful gardener cultivates a hothouse plant. The verb matters. It implies maintenance, feeding, and intention, suggesting that animosity between nations isn’t an accidental spillover of human nature but a managed resource, kept alive because it serves power.

The slyer move is "the conviction that... are inevitable". Trevelyan isn’t arguing with hatreds directly; he’s arguing with the story elites tell about hatreds. Calling rivalries "inevitable" turns politics into weather: regrettable, but beyond anyone’s control. That fatalism is the real target. If conflict is inevitable, then dissent becomes naive, international solidarity becomes sentimental, and the state’s militarized posture becomes responsible realism rather than choice.

Context sharpens the edge. Trevelyan lived through the high age of British imperial administration, when national competition, colonial expansion, and the professionalization of state power were hardening into a worldview. "Ruling classes" signals a modern, structural sensibility: not kings and villains, but interests and institutions. The line anticipates later critiques of how elites use external enemies to manage internal tensions - a pressure valve for inequality, labor unrest, and democratic demands. It’s a warning disguised as diagnosis: the most dangerous propaganda is the kind that presents itself as common sense.