Home > Work > The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
41 " Social Darwinism, that bastard child of evolutionary thinking, and its cousin militarism, fostered the belief that competition among nations was part of nature’s rule and that in the end the fittest would survive. And that probably meant through war. The late nineteenth century’s admiration of the military as the noblest part of the nation and the spread of military values into civilian societies fed the assumptions that war was a necessary part of the great struggle for survival, that it might indeed be good for societies, tuning them up so to speak. "
― Margaret MacMillan , The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
42 " Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening. "
43 " The most stable country in Europe, Britain, had had centuries to build its parliament, local councils, laws, and law courts (and had weathered crises including a civil war along the way). More, British society had grown incrementally and slowly, taking generations to develop attitudes and institutions, from universities to chambers of commerce, clubs and associations, a free press, the whole complex web of civil society which sustains a workable political system. "
44 " One night as the two men sat in a café in Paris, Jaurès described what a future war would be like: “the cannon-fire and the bombs; entire nations decimated; millions of soldiers strewn in mud and blood; millions of corpses …” During a battle on the Western Front some years later, a friend asked Gérard why he was staring into space. “I feel as though all this is familiar to me,” Gérard replied. “Jaurès prophesied this hell, this total annihilation. "