War & Peace Quote by George William Norris

Strict neutrality isn’t just a policy here; it’s an indictment disguised as hindsight. George William Norris frames his argument with the modesty of “To my mind,” then immediately turns that restraint into moral pressure: “what we ought to have maintained.” The phrasing makes neutrality sound like the original, obvious baseline, and everything that followed like a preventable drift - not fate, not inevitability, not “the world situation,” but choices.

Norris’s real target is the soft language governments use to launder involvement. “Strictest neutrality” implies that anything less is a loophole: neutrality in name, partiality in practice. He’s warning that you can slide into war through incremental commitments - loans, arms sales, “defensive” preparations, rhetorical alignment - until the country wakes up “on the verge” of something it never formally voted to enter. That final clause, “at the present time,” is doing work: it’s a snapshot of urgency, an argument aimed at stopping momentum before it hardens into inevitability.

Context matters because Norris was one of the most prominent congressional anti-interventionists of his era, famously voting against U.S. entry into World War I and later resisting the currents pushing America toward broader entanglements. Read that way, the quote isn’t naive isolationism so much as a diagnosis of how democracies get maneuvered into conflict: not by a single thunderclap, but by a long chain of “small” departures from neutrality that add up to war.