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 naive 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 precis were given from memory they necessarily differed one from the other on various