n implication of any
security for the future that this outrage on civilization would not
again be perpetrated at the first profitable opportunity?

"The very substance and style of the speech constitutes a denial of
peace on the only terms on which peace is possible. He is not even
conscious now that Germany has committed any offense against the rights
of free nations.

"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.

An explanation of the Presi