“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.

An explanation of the President’s message to the nations was made by Secretary of State Lansing on the morning of its publication.  In the course of this he asserted that the United States had been brought to “the verge of war,” which was generally understood to mean that a threatened resumption of submarine activities by Germany on a large scale might create an intolerable situation; also that the President desired to know the terms of peace contemplated by the powers at war, so as to be informed as to how they would affect the interests of the United States.

Germany replied to the President’s note on December 26, giving no terms, but lauding the “high-minded suggestion” of Mr. Wilson and proposing “an immediate meeting of delegates of the belligerent states, at a neutral place,” continuing as follows:  “The imperial government is also of the opinion that the great work of preventing further wars can be begun only after the end of the present struggle of the nations.  It will, when this moment shall have come, be ready with pleasure to collaborate entirely with the United States in this exalted task.”

The reply of the Entente Allies to President Wilson’s message was received January 11.  While disclaiming any intention of exterminating the Teutonic peoples, the Allies in this reply stated terms of peace which would result in the humbling of Germany and Austria-Hungary and the expulsion of Turkey from Europe.

ENTENTE PEACE TERMS.