In these conferences the atmosphere easily becomes heavy with suspicion. The sight of a group of eminent gentlemen of various nationalities shutting themselves up morning after morning, for hours, considering matters which concern the peace and happiness of the world, if too long continued, stirs up resentment in the best of us. If you are an impersonal, detached, philosophical, fairly well-informed person, it is not difficult for you to visualize what those gentlemen are doing; if you take the trouble you can even build up in your mind what they are saying. Suppose it is a question of the ratio of capital ships. You know that they are listening to disputes over tonnage and the way it has been computed, are studying long arrays of figures, matters dull in themselves and requiring the closest attention. Most of us would not remain a half hour, unless we were compelled to when such discussions were going on. But if you are a suspicious person, if you have been trained in the cynical school of sensational journalism, to look for mischief and intrigue—and often it must be confessed finding it—you have dark thoughts about the gentlemen.
The only way in which such suspicions can be cleared up—or better, prevented,—is by frequent open sessions and much freer discussion at those sessions than we had at the Conference for Limitation of Armament. Some of the Americans prominent in the Conference have in the last two years frequently criticized the secrecy with which the Paris Conference was conducted but there was very little difference in the procedure from that in Paris. The work there as here was done in committees. There as here there were daily communications to the press. They were more satisfactory here, fuller, but that was made possible by the fact that the situation here was far less complicated and by the rigor with which Mr. Hughes kept one thing at a time on the table. As for the press conferences, in Paris as here they were held daily by the Americans and frequently by all of the other delegations. Nobody in Paris, of course, was so satisfactory to the press as Mr. Hughes. His candor, his good humor, his out-and-out, man-to-man conduct of his daily meeting cannot be too highly praised. He has set a pace for this sort of thing very hard to follow. There was no American in Paris in a position to do for the press what Mr. Hughes did in Washington. President Wilson had not the time. The other members of the delegation were not in Mr. Hughes’ position. Nobody else in our delegation here would have had the authority, even if he had had the ability, to do what Mr. Hughes did. The difference here and in Paris was mainly a difference of situation—the difference between an infinitely difficult and complicated situation and a comparatively well defined and definite one.