here: "La situation du Président Wilson dans nos démocraties est
magnifique, souveraine et extrêmement périlleuse. On ne connaît pas
d'hommes, dans les temps contemporains, ayant eu plus d'autorité et de
puissance; la popularité lui a donné ce que le droit divin ne conférait
pas toujours aux monarques héréditaires. En revanche et par le fait du
choc en retour, sa responsabilité est supérieure à celle du prince le
plus absolu. S'il réussit à organiser le monde d'après ses rêves, sa
gloire dominera les plus hautes gloires; mais il faut dire hardiment que
s'il échouait il plongerait le monde dans un chaos dont le bolchevisme
russe ne nous offre qu'une faible image; et sa responsabilité devant la
conscience humaine dépasserait ce que peut supporter un simple mortel.
Redoutable alternative!"--Cf. _Le Figaro_, February 10, 1919.
[57] From Mr. Wilson's address to Congress read on December 2, 1918. Cf.
_The Times_, December 4, 1918.
[58] Cf. Secretary Lansing's evidence before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, _The Chicago Tribune_, August 27, 1919.
[59] _La Démocratie Nouvelle_, May 27, 1919
[60] _Le Figaro_, March 26, 1919.
[61] Both of them occurred before the armistice, but during the war.
[62] For the accuracy of this and the preceding story I vouch
absolutely. I have the names of persons, places, and authorities, which
are superfluous here.
[63] The Kurds are members of the great Indo-European family to which
the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Teutons, Slavs, Hindus, Persians, and
Afghans belong, whereas the Turks are a branch of a wholly different
stock, the Ural-Altai group, of which the Mongols, Turks, Tartars,
Finns, and Magyars are members.
[64] April 16, 1919.
[65] Madame N---- showed a friend of mine an autograph letter which she
claims to have received from one of her clients, "a world's famous man."
I was several times invited to inspect it at the clairvoyante's abode,
or at my own, if I preferred.
[66] Articles on the subject appeared in the French press. To the best
of my recollection there was one in _Bonsoir_.
[67] The American Red Cross buried sixteen hundred of them in August,
1919. _The Chicago Tribune_ (Paris edition), August 30, 1919.
[68] The reply, of which I possess what was given to me as a copy, is
dated Paris, January 9, 1919, and is in French.
[69] Imagine, for instance, the condition of mind into which the
following day's work must have thrown the American statesman, beset as
he was with political worries of his own. The extract quoted is taken
from _The Daily Mail_ of April 18, 1919 (Paris edition).
President Wilson had a busy day yesterday, as the following list of
engagements shows: 11 A.M. Dr. Wellington Koo, to present the Chinese
Delegation to the Peace Conference. 11.10 A.M. Marquis de Vogué had a
delegation of seven others, representing the Congrès Français, to
present their view as to the disposition of the left bank of the Rhine.
11.30 A.M. Assyrian and Chaldean Delegation, with a message from the
Assyrian-Chaldean nation. 11.45 A.M. Dalmatian Delegation, to present to
the President the result of the plebiscite of that part of Dalmatia
occupied by Italians. _Noon_. M. Bucquet, Chargé d'Affaires of San
Marino, to convey the action of the Grand Council of San Marino,
conferring on the President Honorary Citizenship in the Republic of San
Marino. 12.10 P.M. M. Colonder, Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs. 12.20
P.M. Miss Rose Schneiderman and Miss Mary Anderson, delegates of the
National Women's Trade Union League of the United States. 12.30 P.M. The
Patriarch of Constantinople, the head of the Orthodox Eastern Church.
12.45 P.M. Essad Pasha, delegate of Albania, to present the claims of
Albania. 1 P.M. M.M.L. Coromilas, Greek Minister at Rome, to pay his
respects. _Luncheon_. Mr. Newton D. Baker, Secretary for War. 4 P.M. Mr.
Herbert Hoover. 4.15 P.M. M. Bratiano, of the Rumanian Delegation. 4.30
P.M. Dr. Affonso Costa, former Portuguese Minister, Portuguese Delegate
to the Peace Conference. 4.45 P.M. Boghos Nubar Pasha, president of the
Armenian National Delegation, accompanied by M.A. Aharoman and Professor
A. Der Hagopian, of Robert College. 5.15 P.M. M. Pasitch, of the Serbian
Delegation. 5.30 P.M. Mr. Frank Walsh, of the Irish-American Delegation.
IV
CENSORSHIP AND SECRECY
Never was political veracity in Europe at a lower ebb than during the
Peace Conference. The blinding dust of half-truths cunningly mixed with
falsehood and deliberately scattered with a lavish hand, obscured the
vision of the people, who were expected to adopt or acquiesce in the
judgments of their rulers on the various questions that arose. Four and
a half years of continuous and deliberate lying for victory had
disembodied the spirit of veracity and good faith throughout the world
of politics. Facts were treated as plastic and capable of being shaped
after this fashion or that, according to the aim of the speaker or
writer. Promises were made, not because the things promised were seen to
be necessary or desirable, but merely in order to dispose the public
favorably toward a policy or an expedient, or to create and maintain a
certain frame of mind toward the enemies or the Allies. At elections and
in parliamentary discourses, undertakings were given, some of which were
known to be impossible of fulfilment. Thus the ministers in some of the
Allied countries bound themselves to compel the Germans not only to pay
full compensation for damage wantonly done, but also to defray the
entire cost of the war.
The notion that the enemy would thus make good all losses was manifestly
preposterous. In a century the debt could not be wiped out, even though
the Teutonic people could be got to work steadily and selflessly for
the purpose. For their productivity would be unavailing if their
victorious adversaries were indisposed to admit the products to their
markets. And not only were the governments unwilling, but some of the
peoples announced their determination to boycott German wares on their
own initiative. None the less the nations were for months buoyed up with
the baleful delusion that all their war expenses would be refunded by
the enemy.[70]
It was not the governments only, however, who, after having for over
four years colored and refracted the truth, now continued to twist and
invent "facts." The newspapers, with some honorable exceptions,
buttressed them up and even outstripped them. Plausible unveracity thus
became a patriotic accomplishment and a recognized element of politics.
Parties and states employed it freely. Fiction received the hall-mark of
truth and fancies were current as facts. Public men who had solemnly
hazarded statements belied by subsequent events denied having ever
uttered them. Never before was the baleful theory that error is helpful
so systematically applied as during the war and the armistice. If the
falsehoods circulated and the true facts suppressed were to be collected
and published in a volume, one would realize the depth to which the
standard of intellectual and moral integrity was lowered.[71]
The censorship was retained by the Great Powers during the Conference as
a sort of soft cushion on which the self-constituted dispensers of Fate
comfortably reposed. In Paris, where it was particularly severe and
unreasoning, it protected the secret conclave from the harsh strictures
of the outside world, concealing from the public, not only the
incongruities of the Conference, but also many of the warnings of
contemporary history. In the opinion of unbiased Frenchmen no such
rigorous, systematic, and short-sighted repression of press liberty had
been known since the Third Empire as was kept up under the rule of the
great tribune whose public career had been one continuous campaign
against every form of coercion. This twofold policy of secrecy on the
part of the delegates and censorship on the part of the authorities
proved incongruous as well as dangerous, for, upheld by the eminent
statesmen who had laid down as part of the new gospel the principle of
"open covenants openly arrived at," it furnished the world with a fairly
correct standard by which to interpret the entire phraseology of the
latter-day reformers. Events showed that only by applying that criterion
could the worth of their statements of fact and their promises of
amelioration be gaged. And it soon became clear that most of their
utterances like that about open covenants were to be construed according
to the maxim of _lucus a non lucendo_.
It was characteristic of the system that two American citizens were
employed to read the cablegrams arriving from the United States to
French newspapers. The object was the suppression of such messages as
tended to throw doubt on the useful belief that the people of the great
American Republic were solid behind their President, ready to approve
his decisions and acts, and that his cherished Covenant, sure of
ratification, would serve as a safe guarantee to all the states which
the application of his various principles might leave strategically
exposed. In this way many interesting items of intelligence from the
United States were kept out of the newspapers, while others were
mutilated and almost all were delayed. Protests were unavailing. Nor was
it until several months were gone by that the French public became aware
of the existence of a strong current of American opinion which favored a
critical attitude toward Mr. Wilson's policy and justified misgivings as
to the finality of his decisions. It was a sorry expedient and an
unsuccessful one.
On another occasion strenuous efforts are reported to have been made
through the intermediary of President Wilson to delay the publication in
the United States of a cablegram to a journal there until the Prime
Minister of Britain should deliver a speech in the House of Commons. An
accident balked these exertions and the message appeared.
Publicity was none the less strongly advocated by the plenipotentiaries
in their speeches and writings. These were as sign-posts pointing to
roads along which they themselves were incapable of moving. By their own
accounts they were inveterate enemies of secrecy and censorship. The
President of the United States had publicly said that he "could not
conceive of anything more hurtful than the creation of a system of
censorship that would deprive the people of a free republic such as ours
of their undeniable right to criticize public officials." M. Clemenceau,
who suffered more than most publicists from systematic repression, had
changed the name of his newspaper from the _L'Homme Libre_ to _L'Homme
Enchaîné_, and had passed a severe judgment on "those friends of
liberty" (the government) who tempered freedom with preventive
repression measured out according to the mood uppermost at the
moment.[72] But as soon as he himself became head of the government he
changed his tactics and called his journal _L'Homme Libre_ again. In
the Chamber he announced that "publicity for the 'debates' of the
Conference was generally favored," but in practice he rendered the
system of gagging the press a byword in Europe. Drawing his own line of
demarcation between the permissible and the illicit, he informed the
Chamber that so long as the Conference was engaged on its arduous work
"it must not be said that the head of one government had put forward a
proposal which was opposed by the head of another government."[73] As
though the disagreements, the bickerings, and the serious quarrels of
the heads of the governments could long be concealed from the peoples
whose spokesmen they were!
That bargainings went on at the Conference which a plain-dealing world
ought to be apprised of is the conclusion which every unbiased outsider
will draw from the singular expedients resorted to for the purpose of
concealing them. Before the Foreign Relations Committee in Washington,
State-Secretary Lansing confessed that when, after the treaty had been
signed, the French Senate called for the minutes of the proceedings on
the Commission of the League of Nations, President Wilson telegraphed
from Washington to the Peace Commission requesting it to withhold them.
He further admitted that the only written report of the discussions in
existence was left in Paris, outside the jurisdiction of the United
States Senate. When questioned as to whether, in view of this system of
concealment, the President's promise of "open covenants openly arrived
at" could be said to have been honestly redeemed, Mr. Lansing answered,
"I consider that was carried out."[74] It seems highly probable that in
the same and only in the same sense will the Treaty and the Covenant be
carried out in the spirit or the letter.
During the fateful days of the Conference preventive censorship was
practised with a degree of rigor equaled only by its senselessness. As
late as the month of June, the columns of the newspapers were checkered
with blank spaces. "Scarcely a newspaper in Paris appears uncensored at
present," one press organ wrote. "Some papers protest, but protests are
in vain."[75]
"Practically not a word as to the nature of the Peace terms that France
regards as most vital to her existence appears in the French papers this
morning," complained a journal at the time when even the Germans were
fully informed of what was being enacted. On one occasion _Bonsoir_ was
seized for expressing the view that the Treaty embodied an Anglo-Saxon
peace;[76] on another for reproducing an interview with Marshal Foch
that had already appeared in a widely circulated Paris newspaper.[77] By
way of justifying another of these seizures the French censor alleged
that an article in the paper was deemed uncomplimentary to Mr. Lloyd
George. The editor replied in a letter to the British Premier affirming
that there was nothing in the article but what Mr. Lloyd George could
and should be proud of. In fact, it only commended him "for having
served the interests of his country most admirably and having had
precedence given to them over all others." The letter concluded: "We are
apprehensive that in the whole business there is but one thing truly
uncomplimentary, and that is that the French censorship, for the purpose
of strangling the French press, should employ your name, the name of him
who abolished censorship many weeks ago."[78]
Even when British journalists were dealing with matters as unlikely to
cause trouble as a description of the historic proceedings at Versailles
at which the Germans received the Peace Treaty, the censor held back
their messages, from five o'clock in the afternoon till three the next
morning.[79] Strange though it may seem, it was at first decided that no
newspaper-men should be allowed to witness the formal handing of the
Treaty to the enemy delegates! For it was deemed advisable in the
interests of the world that even that ceremonial should be secret.[80]
These singular methods were impressively illustrated and summarized in a
cartoon representing Mr. Wilson as "The new wrestling champion,"
throwing down his adversary, the press, whose garb, composed of
journals, was being scattered in scraps of paper to the floor, and under
the picture was the legend: "It is forbidden to publish what Marshal
Foch says. It is forbidden to publish what Mr. George thinks. It is
forbidden to publish the Treaty of Peace with Germany. It is forbidden
to publish what happened at ... and to make sure that nothing else will
be published, the censor systematically delays the transmission of every
telegram."[81]
In the Chamber the government was adjured to suppress the institution of
censorship once the Treaty was signed by the Germans, and Ministers were
reminded of the diatribes which they had pronounced against that
institution in the years of their ambitions and strivings. In vain
Deputies described and deplored the process of demoralization that was
being furthered by the methods of the government. "In the provinces as
well as in the capital the journals that displease are seized,
eavesdroppers listen to telephonic conversations, the secrets of private
letters are violated. Arrangements are made that certain telegrams shall
arrive too late, and spies are delegated to the most private meetings.
At a recent gathering of members of the National Press, two spies were
surprised, and another was discovered at the Federation of the Radical
Committees of the Oise."[82] But neither the signature of the Treaty nor
its ratification by Germany occasioned the slightest modification in the
system of restrictions. Paris continued in a state of siege and the
censors were the busiest bureaucrats in the capital.
One undesirable result of this régime of keeping the public in the dark
and indoctrinating it in the views always narrow, and sometimes
mischievous, which the authorities desired it to hold, was that the
absurdities which were allowed to appear with the hall-mark of
censorship were often believed to emanate directly from the government.
Britons and Americans versed in the books of the New Testament were
shocked or amused when told that the censor had allowed the following
passage to appear in an eloquent speech delivered by the ex-Premier, M.
Painlevé: "As Hall Caine, the great American poet, has put it, 'O death,
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'"[83]
Every conceivable precaution was taken against the leakage of
information respecting what was going on in the Council of Ten.
Notwithstanding this, the French papers contrived now and again, during
the first couple of months, to publish scraps of news calculated to
convey to the public a faint notion of the proceedings, until one day a
Nationalist organ boldly announced that the British Premier had
disagreed with the expert commission and with his own colleagues on the
subject of Dantzig and refused to give way. This paragraph irritated the
British statesman, who made a scene at the next meeting of the Council.
"There is," he is reported to have exclaimed, "some one among us here
who is unmindful of his obligations," and while uttering these and other
much stronger words he eyed severely a certain mild individual who is
said to have trembled all over during the philippic. He also launched
out into a violent diatribe against various French journals which had
criticized his views on Poland and his method of carrying them in
council, and he went so far as to threaten to have the Conference
transferred to a neutral country. In conclusion he demanded an
investigation into the origin of the leakage of information and the
adoption of severe disciplinary measures against the journalists who
published the disclosures.[84] Thenceforward the Council of Ten was
suspended and its place taken by a smaller and more secret conclave of
Five, Four, or Three, according as the state of the plenipotentiaries'
health, the requirements of their home politics, or their relations
among themselves caused one or two to quit Paris temporarily.
This measure insured relative secrecy, fostered rumors and gossip, and
rendered criticism, whether helpful or captious, impossible. It also
drove into outer darkness those Allied states whose interests were
described as limited, as though the interests of Italy, whose delegate
was nominally one of the privileged five, were not being treated as more
limited still. But the point of this last criticism would be blunted if,
as some French and Italian observers alleged, the deliberate aim of the
"representatives of the twelve million soldiers" was indeed to enable
peace to be concluded and the world resettled congruously with the
conceptions and in harmony with the interests of the Anglo-Saxon
peoples. But the supposition is gratuitous. There was no such deliberate
plan. After the establishment of the Council of Five, Mr. Lloyd George
and Mr. Wilson made short work of the reports of the expert commissions
whenever these put forward reasoned views differing from their own. In a
word, they became the world's supreme and secret arbiters without
ceasing to be the official champions of the freedom of the lesser states
and of "open covenants openly arrived at." They constituted, so to say,
the living synthesis of contradictories.
The Council of Five then was a superlatively secret body. No secretaries
were admitted to its gatherings and no official minutes of its
proceedings were recorded. Communications were never issued to the
press. It resembled a gang of benevolent conspirators, whose debates and
resolutions were swallowed up by darkness and mystery. Even the most
modest meeting of a provincial taxpayers' association keeps minutes of
its discussions. The world parliament kept none. Eschewing traditional
usages, as became naïve shapers of the new world, and ignoring history,
the Five, Four, or Three shut themselves up in a room, talked informally
and disconnectedly without a common principle, program, or method, and
separated again without having reached a conclusion. It is said that
when one put forth an idea, another would comment upon it, a third might
demur, and that sometimes an appeal would be made to geography, history,
or ethnography, and as the data were not immediately accessible either
competent specialists were sent for or the conversation took another
turn. They very naturally refused to allow these desultory proceedings
to be put on record, the only concession which they granted to the
curiosity of future generations being the fixation of their own physical
features by photography and painting. When the sitting was over,
therefore, no one could be held to aught that he had said; there was
nothing to bind any of the individual delegates to the views he had
expressed, nor was there anything to mark the line to which the Council
as a whole had advanced. Each one was free to dictate to his secretary
his recollections of what had gone on, but as these _précis_ were given
from memory they necessarily differed one from the other on various
important points. On the following morning, or a few days later, the
world's workers would meet again, and either begin at the beginning,
traveling over the same familiar field, or else break fresh ground. In
this way in one day they are said to have skimmed the problems of
Spitzbergen, Morocco, Dantzig, and the feeding of the enemy populations,
leaving each problem where they had found it. The moment the discussion
of a contentious question approached a climax, the specter of
disagreement deterred them from pursuing it to a conclusion, and they
passed on quickly to some other question. And when, after months had
been spent in these Penelopean labors, definite decisions respecting the
peace had to be taken lest the impatient people should rise up and wrest
matters into their own hands, the delegates referred the various
problems which they had been unable to solve to the wisdom and tact of
the future League of Nations.