But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.

William Cowper (1731–1800), a major English poet of the late eighteenth century, wrote frequently on public morality and the human costs of political ambition. This couplet comes from his long poem *The Task* (1785), a work that ranges from domestic and rural scenes to pointed commentary on national life. In the 1780s Britain had recently emerged from the American War of Independence and remained entangled in European power politics; Cowper’s Protestant, reform-minded sensibility made him sharply critical of war as a pastime of rulers conducted at the expense of ordinary people. The lines appear in a passage condemning the frivolity with which monarchs treat warfare.

Cowper compresses a political argument into a bitter metaphor: war is treated like a “game” by kings, something played for pride, territory, or prestige rather than necessity. The sting lies in the conditional—“were their subjects wise”—which implies that popular consent (or at least popular acquiescence) enables dynastic conflict. If the governed understood the true stakes—death, ruin, taxation, and moral degradation—they would refuse to be moved like pieces on a board. The couplet thus anticipates later democratic critiques of militarism: it shifts responsibility from heroic rulers to the political awareness of the people, and exposes the mismatch between elite incentives and mass suffering.