atification, 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.

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 o