[President Hoover, as quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts]

Upon this day all thoughts must turn to our heroic dead whose lives were given in defense of the liberties and ideals of our country. Their contribution to these priceless heritages was made without reservation; they gave the full measure of their intelligence and energy and enthusiasm, and life itself, forfeiting their portion of further happiness—all, that we and our children might live on more safely, more happily, and more assured of the precious blessings of security and peace.

A solemn obligation lies upon us to press forward in our pursuit of those things for which they died. Our duty is to seek ever new and widening opportunities to insure the world against the horror and irretrievable wastage of war. Much has been done, but we must wage peace continuously, with the same energy as they waged war....

The promotion of peace and prevention of war, however, cannot rest upon the accomplishments of any one year. The outlook for peace is happier than for half a century, yet we cannot overlook the fact that nations in many ways are always potentially in conflict. There are not only the accumulated age-old controversies and ambitions which are alive with prejudice, emotion, and passion, but you may be assured that there will always be an unceasing crop of new controversies between nations.

Every shift in power, every advance in communications, in trade and finance, daily increases the points of contact of one nation with another. The diffusion of their citizens and their property abroad increasingly penetrates and overlaps into the four corners of the earth. The many inventions of these citizens, their ceaseless energies, bring an hourly grist to our foreign offices of contested right or grievance. It is true that many of these contacts make for understanding and good will; it is indeed of the first importance to peace that these happy influences be cultivated, and that the unhappy ones be disposed of with justice and good will....

The war that ended on this day ... taught us one thing, if nothing else, and that is the blessing of peace. When we look back upon the splendid valor and heriosim then displayed, when we remember the magnificent energies poured forth by young and old, when we recall the marvelous exercise of the greatest virtues that glorify the human race—unselfishness, self-sacrifice, cooperation, both by men and women—we are looking not upon qualities which war creates, but rather upon the traits of the human race which war makes seem more vivid by contrast with its own horrors.

These same qualities are exercised, but are unsung and unheralded, in times of peace. Those who died displaying them would have displayed them living, and would have wrought their fruits into the enduring fabric of our peaceful destiny. We can only pledge ourselves, in honor of their memory, to the task of making ever more unlikely that our youth hereafter shall be denied its opportunity to devote its idealism and its energies to the constructive arts of peace.

[A Correspondent, in the Times Weekly Edition, London, England]

The troubled years that have passed since 1918 have brought great changes everywhere. These are obvious, not only in the birth of nations, new forms of government, the reversal of national policies, experiments in industrial reorganization and in social ideals, but also in a new insistence on moral and religious values which have their influence even where they excite most criticism. Even in matters of religion, in which men are most conservative and least welcome anything that seems to depart from tradition, men are aware of a new atmosphere.

As we contemplate the world that is coming into existence we find that one law must guide us, the old law of worthy living, the law of sacrifice. On that day in November, ... after more than four years of bitter war, the spirit of sacrifice gained its throne and received its crown. Having rescued the world from the madness of self-destruction, it did not vacate its sovereignty; rather it began a new era of its eternal power. We are learning the lesson that sacrifice is the secret of all true living. Our deliverance was secured by the spirit of limitless renunciation. No thoughtful man reflecting on his own experience and looking at it, not merely within the limits of his own interests, but in the wider ranges of our common manhood, can doubt that the new world that is in the course of construction must find its life in that same law of sacrifice.

As this becomes more evident we find a new meaning in Armistice Day.... We see more clearly that the spirit of self-sacrifice must be ours, and that unless we recognize this we can have no share in those deeper satisfactions of the soul which come with memory's requickened consciousness of a fellowship with those whose sacrifice is their glory. In response to this deeper message of Armistice Day we shall find ourselves dowered with strength for victory against those foes of the spiritual order before which the highest attainments of civilization are as naught.

In this spirit we shall become more aware of the eternal verities that remain unshaken in a world that is passing away to become new. There is one saying of the Master's which occurs in all the four Gospels: He that findeth his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life shall find it. Six times it appears in slightly different forms, as if it had gained dominance over the minds of the disciples. There is no limit to the modes by which sacrifice is expressed....

To-day we all acknowledge that we need to learn this secret of true cooperation. Men do not live in true unity if that which keeps them together is self-interest, whether individual or corporate. They must look beyond themselves and their own advantage to learn how no true gain is achieved except by sacrifice.

[Editorial in States, New Orleans, Louisiana]

When the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the world was so spent and ravaged by the long conflict it could not then foresee that the mood of humanity would ever again be tolerant of any preparation for another war. It seemed incredible at that time that all human feet would not hasten to be "shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace." Yet with every recurrence of Armistice Day there is a tendency to forget the horrors of war under the spell of its heroisms, and regard it (as other human ills are regarded) as legitimate and necessary, simply because it is thought to be unavoidable. Instead of eradicating the memories of war, as we forget other errors we have made when knowledge corrects them, we magnify them in our ceremonials and practice the "virtue of preparedness" in our statecraft. So long as memory holds war to be a heroic pageantry of life and death, or to be an inescapable force that periodically takes possession of civilization, ... the vicious circle of war and armistice will never be broken. For we walk in the direction we look; and so long as we competitively plan and build for war, parity will seem more important and necessary to national aggrandizement than the preparation of the gospel of peace.... But ... the best thought-forces of the world, including all nations signatory to the Pact of Paris, are pledged to the preparation of the "good-spell" of peace. As Dr. Charles W. Pipkin, of the Government Department of the State University, says in a recent publication: "International cooperation as an ideal has made tremendous progress in the world. ... What has been achieved by the League of Nations, the World Court, the Pact of Paris, and the London Naval Conference ... is proof of Victor Hugo's saying that you can stop an army of men, but you cannot stop an idea when its time has come."

On Armistice Day, we can best honor our war-dead by dishonoring the savage institution that martyred them. Instead of promoting war by the rivalries of preparedness and an insular patriotism, we should seek to create a peace-minded world of universal brotherhood that would "remember war no more." And the armor needed for that result was recommended by Paul to the men of Ephesus: "Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; ... taking the shield of faith, ... the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."

[Rev. Ralph Guy, as quoted in the Bridgnorth Journal, Shropshire, England]

Men everywhere are asking solemn questions. They are asking for a God who will fit the facts. It is for the church to face the facts or to fall to pieces. It is for the church to open its doors so that the river of knowledge shall flow in. Are we to teach men what is not true, or fear to teach what is? Is religion, true religion, I mean—which is woven into the warp and weft of the world—... is it to be clothed in narrow creeds, in age-long ignorance, in terror, in timidity and superstition? The creator of the world, the eternal Father of His children, is not the invention of some ancient priest that He is going to fall to pieces. The church that is afraid that God will collapse and that faith will break down and the pulpit become a washout if science is true, is an idol of Baal and shall most assuredly perish. He who was and is and ever more shall be cannot be extinguished.... Surely our proper attitude towards the great upheaval through which we have steered our way is one of silence, and as we see God's judgments executed—the divine laws vindicated—to prove that there is a justice which never sleeps and a moral government of the world which though balked and delayed never fails to assert its everlasting authority.

[The Rt. Hon. Philip Snowden, in radio speech, as quoted in the New York Times, New York]

The common people of all lands are longing for peace. Let us rise, then, to the majesty of our opportunity. Let us banish war from human thought and experience, so that our children and our children's children will rise up and call us blessed.

[Dr. William Warren Sweet, as quoted in the Living Age, New York, New York]

International good will can only come out of an adequate international understanding. To be fair to others and to ourselves, we need to understand.