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.
When misunderstandings arose as to what had been said or done it was the official translator, M. Paul Mantoux—one of the most brilliant representatives of Jewry at the Conference—who was wont to decide, his memory being reputed superlatively tenacious. In this way he attained the distinction of which his friends are justly proud, of being a living record—indeed, the sole available record—of what went on at the historic council. He was the recipient and is now the only repository of all the secrets of which the plenipotentiaries were so jealous, lest, being a kind of knowledge which is in verity power, it should be used one day for some dubious purpose. But M. Mantoux enjoyed the esteem and confidence not only of Mr. Wilson, but also of the British Prime Minister, who, it was generally believed, drew from his entertaining narratives and shrewd appreciations whatever information he possessed about French politics and politicians. It was currently affirmed that, being a man of method and foresight, M. Mantoux committed everything to writing for his own behoof. Doubts, however, were entertained and publicly expressed as to whether affairs of this magnitude, involving the destinies of the world, should have been handled in such secret and unbusiness-like fashion. But on the supposition that the general outcome, if not the preconceived aim, of the policy of the Anglo-Saxon plenipotentiaries was to confer the beneficent hegemony of the world upon its peoples, there could, it was argued, be no real danger in the procedure followed. For, united, those nations have nothing to fear.
Although the translations were done rapidly, elegantly, and lucidly, allegations were made that they lost somewhat by undue compression and even by the process of toning down, of which the praiseworthy object was to spare delicate susceptibilities. For a limited number of delicate susceptibilities were treated considerately by the Conference. A defective rendering made a curious impression on the hearers once, when a delegate said: "My country, unfortunately, is situated in the midst of states which are anything but peace-loving—in fact, the chief danger to the peace of Europe emanates from them." M. Mantoux's translation ran, "The country represented by M. X. unhappily presents the greatest danger to the peace of Europe."
On several occasions passages of the discourses of the plenipotentiaries underwent a certain transformation in the well-informed brain of M. Mantoux before being done into another language. They were plunged, so to say, in the stream of history before their exposure to the light of day. This was especially the case with the remarks of the English-speaking delegates, some of whom were wont to make extensive use of the license taken by their great national poet in matters of geography and history. One of them, for example, when alluding to the ex-Emperor Franz Josef and his successor, said: "It would be unjust to visit the sins of the father on the head of his innocent son. Charles I should not be made to suffer for Franz Josef." M. Mantoux rendered the sentence, "It would be unjust to visit the sins of the uncle on the innocent nephew," and M. Clemenceau, with a merry twinkle in his eye, remarked to the ready interpreter, "You will lose your job if you go on making these wrong translations."
But those details are interesting, if at all, only as means of eking out a mere sketch which can never become a complete and faithful picture. It was the desire of the eminent lawgivers that the source of the most beneficent reforms chronicled in history should be as well hidden as those of the greatest boon bestowed by Providence upon man. And their motives appear to have been sound enough.
The pains thus taken to create a haze between themselves and the peoples whose implicit confidence they were continuously craving constitute one of the most striking ethico-psychological phenomena of the Conference. They demanded unreasoning faith as well as blind obedience. Any statement, however startling, was expected to carry conviction once it bore the official hall-mark. Take, for example, the demand made by the Supreme Four to Bela Kuhn to desist from his offensive against the Slovaks. The press expressed surprise and disappointment that he, a Bolshevist, should have been invited even hypothetically by the "deadly enemies of Bolshevism" to delegate representatives to the Paris Conference from which the leaders of the Russian constructive elements were excluded. Thereupon the Supreme Four, which had taken the step in secret, had it denied categorically that such an invitation had been issued. The press was put up to state that, far from making such an undignified advance, the Council had asserted its authority and peremptorily summoned the misdemeanant Kuhn to withdraw his troops immediately from Slovakia under heavy pains and penalties.