a patriotic accomplishment and a recognized element of politics.
Parties and states employed it freely. Fiction received the hall-mark of
truth and fancies were current as facts. Public men who had solemnly
hazarded statements belied by subsequent events denied having ever
uttered them. Never before was the baleful theory that error is helpful
so systematically applied as during the war and the armistice. If the
falsehoods circulated and the true facts suppressed were to be collected
and published in a volume, one would realize the depth to which the
standard of intellectual and moral integrity was lowered.[71]

The censorship was retained by the Great Powers during the Conference as
a sort of soft cushion on which the self-constituted dispensers of Fate
comfortably reposed. In Paris, where it was particularly severe and
unreasoning, it protected the secret conclave from the harsh strictures
of the outside world, concealing from the public, not only the
incongruities of the Conference, but also many of the warnings of
contemporary history. In the opinion of unbiased Frenchmen no such
rigorous, systematic, and short-sighted repression of press liberty had
been known since the Third Empire as was kept up under the rule of the
great tribune whose public career had been one continuous campaign
against every form of coercion. This twofold policy of secrecy on the
part of the delegates and censorship on the part of the authorities
proved incongruous as well as dangerous, for, upheld by the eminent
statesmen who had laid down as part of the new gospel the principle of
"open covenants openly arrived at," it furnished the world with a fairly
correct standard by which to interpret the entire phraseology of the
latter-day reformers. Events showed that only by applying that criterion
could the worth of their statements of fact and their promises of
amelioration be gaged. And it soon became clear that most of their
utterances like that about open covenants were to be construed according
to the maxim of _lucus a non lucendo_.

It was characteristic of the system that two American citizens were
employed to read the cablegrams arriving from the United States to
French newspapers. The object was the suppression of such messages as
tended to throw doubt on the useful belief that the people of the great
American Republic were solid behind their President, ready to approve
his decisions and acts, and that his cherished Covenant, sure of
r