“Please send Kock or other reliable person immediately to Petrograd to Schklovsky, minister of foreign affairs, with following message for Tchitcherin, sent on my personal responsibility:  ’Individuals of neutral States are considering organization for feeding Russia.  Will perhaps decide something definite within a week.’—­Bullitt.”

     CHRISTIAN A. HERTER,
     Assistant to Mr. White.

I believe that telegram was dispatched.  I do not know.

Senator KNOX.  Mr. Bullitt, I want to ask you a question.  You have told us that you went to Russia with instructions from the Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing, with a definition of the American policy by Mr. House, with the approval of Lloyd George, who approved of your mission, of the purposes for which you were being sent.  Now, tell us whether or not to your knowledge your report and the proposal of the Soviet Government was ever formally taken up by the peace conference and acted on?

Mr. BULLITT.  It was never formally laid before the peace conference, which I believe met only six times during the course of the entire proceedings of what is called the peace conference.

LLOYD GEORGE DECEIVES PARLIAMENT

Senator KNOX.  Did not Mr. Lloyd George in a speech to Parliament assert that he had never received the proposal with which you returned from Russia?  Have you a copy of his speech?

Mr. BULLITT.  About a week after I had handed to Mr. Lloyd George the official proposal, with my own hands, in the presence of three other persons, he made a speech before the British Parliament, and gave the British people to understand that he knew nothing whatever about any such proposition.  It was a most egregious case of misleading the public, perhaps the boldest that I have ever known in my life.  On the occasion of that statement of Mr. Lloyd George, I wrote the President.  I clipped his statement from a newspaper and sent it to the President, and I asked the President to inform me whether the statement of Mr. Lloyd George was true or untrue.  He was unable to answer, inasmuch as he would have had to reply on paper that Mr. Lloyd George had made an untrue statement.  So flagrant was this that various members of the British mission called on me at the Crillon, a day or so later, and apologized for the Prime Minister’s action in the case.

Senator KNOX.  Have you a copy of Lloyd George’s remarks in the Parliament?

Mr. BULLITT.  I have a copy.

Senator KNOX.  Suppose you read it?

Mr. BULLITT.  It is as follows: 

Mr. CLYNES.  Before the right honorable gentleman comes to the next subject, can he make any statement on the approaches or representations alleged to have been made to his Government by persons acting on behalf of such government as there is in Central Russia?

Mr. LLOYD GEORGE.  We have had no approaches at all except what have appeared in the papers.