"Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone"
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Hayes doesn’t romanticize war; he normalizes it as a stubborn byproduct of the species. The line is built on a deliberately uneasy pairing: moral aspiration ("in my soul" he believes in cooperation and arbitration) stapled to a grim concession (the soldier won’t be obsolete "until human nature is gone"). That tension is the point. Hayes is not offering a philosophy seminar so much as a governing posture: pursue peace mechanisms without indulging the fantasy that institutions can fully outpace appetite, pride, fear, and revenge.
The rhetoric works because it refuses purity. "Arbitration" signals the late-19th-century faith in rules, treaties, and rational dispute resolution, the emerging internationalist impulse that would later animate formal peace conferences. But Hayes keeps it tethered to a darker anthropology. By framing war as coextensive with "human nature", he shifts blame away from any single regime and toward the recurring patterns leaders have to manage. That move reads as both sober and politically useful: it validates military readiness while still allowing him to sound like a reform-minded modernizer.
The subtext is Reconstruction-era realism filtered through a post-Civil War presidency. Hayes governed a country still dealing with the aftershocks of internal conflict, veterans in public life, and a federal government trying to project order at home while joining a world of imperial competition abroad. His sentence is a détente between idealism and security doctrine: build better tools for peace, but don’t tell citizens the knife has been invented out of existence.
The rhetoric works because it refuses purity. "Arbitration" signals the late-19th-century faith in rules, treaties, and rational dispute resolution, the emerging internationalist impulse that would later animate formal peace conferences. But Hayes keeps it tethered to a darker anthropology. By framing war as coextensive with "human nature", he shifts blame away from any single regime and toward the recurring patterns leaders have to manage. That move reads as both sober and politically useful: it validates military readiness while still allowing him to sound like a reform-minded modernizer.
The subtext is Reconstruction-era realism filtered through a post-Civil War presidency. Hayes governed a country still dealing with the aftershocks of internal conflict, veterans in public life, and a federal government trying to project order at home while joining a world of imperial competition abroad. His sentence is a détente between idealism and security doctrine: build better tools for peace, but don’t tell citizens the knife has been invented out of existence.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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