Five, Four, or Three, according as the state of the plenipotentiaries'
health, the requirements of their home politics, or their relations
among themselves caused one or two to quit Paris temporarily.

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