On several occasions passages of the discourses of the plenipotentiaries underwent a certain transformation in the well-informed brain of M. Mantoux before being done into another language.  They were plunged, so to say, in the stream of history before their exposure to the light of day.  This was especially the case with the remarks of the English-speaking delegates, some of whom were wont to make extensive use of the license taken by their great national poet in matters of geography and history.  One of them, for example, when alluding to the ex-Emperor Franz Josef and his successor, said:  “It would be unjust to visit the sins of the father on the head of his innocent son.  Charles I should not be made to suffer for Franz Josef.”  M. Mantoux rendered the sentence, “It would be unjust to visit the sins of the uncle on the innocent nephew,” and M. Clemenceau, with a merry twinkle in his eye, remarked to the ready interpreter, “You will lose your job if you go on making these wrong translations.”

But those details are interesting, if at all, only as means of eking out a mere sketch which can never become a complete and faithful picture.  It was the desire of the eminent lawgivers that the source of the most beneficent reforms chronicled in history should be as well hidden as those of the greatest boon bestowed by Providence upon man.  And their motives appear to have been sound enough.

The pains thus taken to create a haze between themselves and the peoples whose implicit confidence they were continuously craving constitute one of the most striking ethico-psychological phenomena of the Conference.  They demanded unreasoning faith as well as blind obedience.  Any statement, however startling, was expected to carry conviction once it bore the official hall-mark.  Take, for example, the demand made by the Supreme Four to Bela Kuhn to desist from his offensive against the Slovaks.  The press expressed surprise and disappointment that he, a Bolshevist, should have been invited even hypothetically by the “deadly enemies of Bolshevism” to delegate representatives to the Paris Conference from which the leaders of the Russian constructive elements were excluded.  Thereupon the Supreme Four, which had taken the step in secret, had it denied categorically that such an invitation had been issued.  The press was put up to state that, far from making such an undignified advance, the Council had asserted its authority and peremptorily summoned the misdemeanant Kuhn to withdraw his troops immediately from Slovakia under heavy pains and penalties.

Subsequently, however, the official correspondence was published, when it was seen that the implicit invitation had really been issued and that the denial ran directly counter to fact.  By this exposure the Council of Four, which still sued for the full confidence of their peoples, was somewhat embarrassed.  This embarrassment was not allayed when what purported to be a correct explanation of their action was given