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.