There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.

Jerrold contrasts two kinds of ruin: the obvious physical destruction of war and a subtler moral or civic erosion that can occur in certain kinds of “peace.” The line suggests that peace is not automatically virtuous; if it is purchased by cowardice, complacency, corruption, or the surrender of conscience and public spirit, it can “destroy” what he calls manhood—i.e., courage, independence, and moral agency—more thoroughly than battle destroys bodies. The aphorism belongs to a tradition of Victorian political satire that treats comfort and quiet as potentially enervating, warning that a society can lose its vitality and dignity without a shot being fired.