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 Enchaine, 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]