"Listen to this from the note:
"'Not for an instant have they [the Central Powers] swerved from the conviction that respect of the rights of other nations is not in any degree incompatible with their own rights and interests.'
"The note and speech prove that they have not yet learned the alphabet of respect for the rights of others.
"The Allies entered this war to defend Europe against the aggression of Prussian military domination, and, having begun it, they must insist that the only end is the most complete effective guarantee against the possibility of that caste ever again disturbing the peace of Europe.
"You can't have absolute equality in sacrifice. In war that is impossible. But you can have equal readiness to sacrifice from all. There are hundreds of thousands who have given their lives; there are millions who have given up comfortable homes and exchanged them for daily communion with death. Multitudes have given up those whom they loved best.
FOR NATIONAL LENT.
"Let the nation as a whole place its comforts, its luxuries, its indulgences, its elegances on the national altar consecrated by such sacrifices as these men have made! Let us proclaim during the war a national Lent! The nation will be better and stronger for it, mentally and morally, as well as physically. It will strengthen its fiber and ennoble its spirit. Without it we shall not get the full benefit of this struggle.
"Our armies have driven the enemy out of the battered villages of France and across the devastated plains of Belgium. They might hurl him across the Rhine in battered disarray. But unless the nation as a whole shoulders part of the burden of victory it won't profit by the triumph, for it is not what a nation gains, but what it gives that makes it great."
PEACE MESSAGE BY PRESIDENT WILSON.
A bombshell was cast into the camps of the nations at war on December 20, when President Wilson unexpectedly addressed a message to the belligerents, urging them to state their terms of peace and end the war without further fighting.