"Christmas is around again. Even the hard minds feel in some degree the softening sentiment of the season. Yet many times has Christmas found the peoples of the nations plunged in hellish war. At such times the sentiment associated with the occasion has been but a ghastly mockery.

"But never has a Christmas season been ushered in to the accompaniment of such dark distress and fearsome calamity in the civilised world as this Christmas of 1914. Ruin, desolation, sorrow, pain and wholesale cruel death are the black attendants of this year's festival of the Son of Peace. A more dreadful paradox is not to be found in all the records of humankind.

"Mothers in countless numbers grieve for sons gone for ever from the festive family board, wives innumerable weep at the sight of empty chairs, and children mourn the fathers who will never return. Millions will not even have the homes of last year wherein to hold the gay reunion, for the hand of dire destruction has swept in a wide, sad circle. 'Tis Christmas time, the season of Peace on Earth. Peace on Earth? A dreadful satire of a phrase in present conditions. May this, the worst Christmas on record, be the last of its kind, and, when peace comes may it continue for ever, all over the earth."