AMERICA AND AN ARMISTICE
SIR,—It is reported from America that Senator Pittman, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, has said in a broadcast that " both Germany and Britain must now realise more fully the terrible costs of war and both, therefore, must be more amenable to arbitration. He suggested a thirty-day armistice, which would enable the neutral Powers to offer their services in reconciling the divergent war aims of the belligerents."
It may not be irrelevant to recall the fact that during the years of the American Civil War John, Bright was in constant and intimate communication with Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, and that at one stage of the war when there was some talk in the North of a peace of compromise with the slave States Bright, the very protagonist of peace, gave all the weight of his counsel against it. Fundamentally, the cause of the Allies today is identical with that of the American North eighty years ago—in the great words of Dante, " that on this little threshing-floor of mortals life may be lived freely and in peace "—and talk of "reconciling the divergent war aims of the belligerents " is not less unreal and mischievous now
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