War & Peace Quote by Henry Campbell-Bannerman

“You have indeed done much…” sounds like polite tribute, but it’s also a diplomatic instrument: praise as pressure. Campbell-Bannerman, a Liberal prime minister writing in the early 1900s, is speaking from inside a Europe that’s modernizing fast - mass politics, mass media, mass armies - and quietly arming even faster. The “new century” isn’t just a calendar marker; it’s a rhetorical reset button. He’s framing peace not as a dreamy ideal but as the defining project of modernity, something that the era demands and that leaders can be judged on.

The key move is how he describes public feeling: “growing” and “insistent.” That pairing turns anti-war sentiment into a force of history, not a fashionable opinion. It’s a reminder to the addressee (likely a prominent international figure in the peace movement) that they have an audience behind them, and a warning to governments that the old assumption - wars as routine policy tools - is starting to look illegitimate. “Give shape and substance” matters, too: he’s crediting practical architecture (conferences, arbitration courts, treaties) over mere moralizing.

Yet the subtext is anxious. The verb “may be banished” is deliberately modest, almost legalistic, because outright confidence would sound naive amid imperial competition and nationalist tinder. Campbell-Bannerman’s intent is to elevate peace-building into respectable statecraft while conceding the odds. Read from the vantage point of 1914, the line lands as both aspiration and premonition: the century is new, but the machinery of war is already waiting for its next assignment.