War & Peace Quote by William R. Alger

Alger’s line sells surrender as strategy: the “highest secret” isn’t better tactics or stronger armies, but alignment. “To will what God wills” reframes victory and peace as outcomes you don’t so much seize as consent to. The phrase carries a distinctly 19th-century American confidence that history has a moral spine and that the individual can plug into it through disciplined feeling. It’s aspirational, but also politically convenient: if God and destiny are on your side, dissent starts to look less like disagreement and more like impiety.

The subtext is a bargain between agency and inevitability. Alger doesn’t ask you to abdicate action; he asks you to sanctify it. “Strike a league with destiny” is the pivot. A league is a pact between equals, suggesting destiny isn’t a prison but a negotiating partner. That metaphor flatters the reader: you’re not a pawn, you’re a signatory. Yet the pact also narrows the moral universe. If destiny is the contract, the messiness of contingency, error, and unintended consequences gets smoothed into providence.

Context matters. Alger wrote in an era steeped in Protestant moralism and the rhetoric of providential progress, when “peace” and “victory” often traveled with nation-building, reform movements, and war alike. The sentence works because it offers spiritual certainty without requiring passivity: obey the higher will, then act with the clean conscience of someone who believes history itself has authorized the strike.