DEAR TUMULTY: Thank you for the memorandum about peace suggestions. I have read it very carefully and find my own thoughts travelling very much the same route. You may be sure I am doing a great deal of serious thinking about it all.     Faithfully,       W. W. The President, through the State Department and various instrumentalities to which he had access for information, was keeping in touch with the German situation and understood from the beginning what the German game was with reference to peace, and to the various offers which he was making. He knew that the German peace offers were merely an attempt on the part of the civil government of Germany to avert a resumption of ruthlessness at sea; that they were mere gestures on the part of the German Government made to bolster up the morale of the German people and that these German offers did not indicate the real desire for peace on equitable terms, as subsequent events showed, but that they were the terms of peace of a nation which thought itself the victor, and, therefore, in a position ruthlessly to dictate a final settlement. Many of the advisers of the President suggested that he should ignore these offers. But the President was wiser than those around him in accepting the German bid at its face value, and he finally called upon Germany to state the practical terms upon which she was willing to consider a settlement for peace. There was another reason for the President's patience. Foreseeing an inevitable crisis with Germany over the frequent sinking of our ships, he was fully conscious that he could not draw the whole country with him in aggressive action if before he took the step leading to war he had not tried out every means of peace. While his enemies denounced his meekness and apparent subservience to German diplomacy, and while some went so far as to characterize his conduct as cowardly, he serenely moved on and forced Germany to a show-down. He not only asked Germany to state her terms, but he frankly asked the Allies to give to the world their statement of what they considered the basis of peace. One of the phrases in his note to the Allies which caused great irritation was that "neither side had stated the object for which the war had been started." While he was criticized for this at the time, it did just what he intended it to do. It forced Germany openly to avow what she believed to be the basis of peace, and gave the Allies their chance, as if they were being forced to do it by the American President, to say what they thought would be a just settlement. In the latter part of January Germany announced to the United States that she was going to begin, on February first, unrestricted submarine warfare in the zone around the British Isles, and undertook to specify the route which a restricted number of American ships might take through this zone.