War & Peace Quote by John Edward Redmond

Redmond’s line is a masterclass in turning budget talk into a moral indictment. He starts with the most bourgeois, least romantic word in politics: “pay.” Not “honor,” not “duty.” Pay. The repetition is a drumbeat of coerced consent, designed to make the listener feel the drag of taxation as something almost bodily. Then he detonates the bargain at the heart of imperial governance: the state demands the costs of great-power machinery while withholding the benefits that are supposed to justify it.

The navy is the cleanest example because it’s ostensibly defensive. Redmond punctures that neutrality by pointing out the absence of Irish “commerce” to defend; the implication is economic strangulation or structural exclusion under British rule. If you don’t get trade, ports, or policy autonomy, a navy isn’t protection - it’s pageantry paid for by the people watching from outside the gates.

Then he pivots to the army, where the subtext sharpens into outright political alienation. “Loathe and execrate” is not parliamentary understatement; it’s the language of a population asked to bankroll actions it experiences as oppression, whether abroad in imperial campaigns or at home in coercive policing. The phrasing “work upon which it has been engaged” is a sly euphemism, as if to say: you know exactly what I mean, and naming it would only make it uglier.

Context matters: Redmond, the face of constitutional Irish nationalism, is arguing that Union extracts revenue and loyalty while delivering neither prosperity nor legitimate security. The sentence doesn’t merely complain about waste; it reframes the relationship as illegitimate. Paying without benefit is one injustice. Paying for what you despise is the deeper one: complicity converted into grievance, and grievance into a case for self-government.