When one reviews the negotiations at Paris from December, 1918, to June, 1919, the secretiveness which characterized them is very evident.  Everybody seemed to talk in whispers and never to say anything worth while except in confidence.  The open sessions of the Conference were arranged beforehand.  They were formal and perfunctory.  The agreements and bargains were made behind closed doors.  This secrecy began with the exchange of views concerning the League of Nations, following which came the creation of the Council of Ten, whose meetings were intended to be secret.  Then came the secret sessions of the Commission on the League and the numerous informal interviews of the President with one or more of the Premiers of the Allied Powers, the facts concerning which were not divulged to the American Commissioners.  Later, on Mr. Wilson’s return from the United States, dissatisfaction with and complaint of the publicity given to some of the proceedings of the Council of Ten induced the formation of the Council of Four with the result that the secrecy of the negotiations was practically unbroken.  If to this brief summary of the increasing secretiveness of the proceedings of the controlling bodies of the Peace Conference are added the intrigues and personal bargainings which were constantly going on, the “log-rolling”—­to use a term familiar to American politics—­which was practiced, the record is one which invites no praise and will find many who condemn it.  In view of the frequent and emphatic declarations in favor of “open diplomacy” and the popular interpretation placed upon the phrase “Open covenants openly arrived at,” the effect of the secretive methods employed by the leading negotiators at Paris was to destroy public confidence in the sincerity of these statesmen and to subject them to the charge of pursuing a policy which they had themselves condemned and repudiated.  Naturally President Wilson, who had been especially earnest in his denunciation of secret negotiations, suffered more than his foreign colleagues, whose real support of “open diplomacy” had always been doubted, though all of them in a measure fell in public estimation as a consequence of the way in which the negotiations were conducted.

The criticism and condemnation, expressed with varying degrees of intensity, resulted from the disappointed hopes of the peoples of the world, who had looked forward confidently to the Peace Conference at Paris as the first great and decisive change to a new diplomacy which would cast aside the cloak of mystery that had been in the past the recognized livery of diplomatic negotiations.  The record of the Paris proceedings in this particular is a sorry one.  It is the record of the abandonment of principle, of the failure to follow precepts unconditionally proclaimed, of the repudiation by act, if not by word, of a new and better type of international intercourse.