Ezra Pound Quotes
The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.
Pound, Ezra. The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, edited by D. D. Paige, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950.
The speech was addressed to those American imperialist forces that were supporting the war in the Philippines.
This was a precursor of the total war views of William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War half a century later.
There were some British politicians who had considered the possibility of supporting the South in the Civil War to assure their supply of cheap cotton. Entering the war by allying with the Confederacy was also a possibility. Lincoln used this phrase and instructed Adams to use that with the British politicians as the result if England get involved with the American Civil war. It is the closest phrase to “World War” until WWI.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).