War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Root is selling optimism the way a seasoned lawyer sells a settlement: not as sentiment, but as strategy. In 1912, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he had spent years trying to professionalize diplomacy through arbitration courts and international law. This line smuggles a moral claim into a practical policy argument: peace is not just built by treaties and deterrence; it can be engineered by contact.

The key move is his faith in “better acquaintance.” Root assumes hostility is, at least partly, an information problem. People (and by extension nations) don’t naturally loathe one another; they default to suspicion when they’re strangers. Get them into repeated, structured interaction and the temperature drops. It’s a deceptively modern insight, anticipating what social science would later call contact theory: familiarity doesn’t guarantee harmony, but it makes demonization harder to maintain.

Subtext: he’s arguing against the era’s fatalism about war. In the decades before World War I, Europe was armed to the teeth and nationalism was in vogue. Root’s answer isn’t utopian disarmament; it’s institutionalized proximity - conferences, courts, student exchanges, commercial ties, professional networks - the slow boring of bureaucratic holes through prejudice. “Strive” matters too: peace isn’t a posture, it’s work, and it has to be done proactively, before crises turn caricatures into casus belli.

There’s also a patrician blind spot. Root’s “men” are rational actors who warm up with evidence. He underplays how power, propaganda, and inequality can keep strangers profitable - and therefore permanently unfamiliar. Still, the line endures because it frames peace as a design problem: reduce distance, and you reduce the stories that make violence feel necessary.