which enveloped
its deliberations emphasized as nothing else could have done the
secretiveness with which adjustments were being made and compromises
were being effected. It directed attention also to the fact that the
Four Great Powers had taken supreme control of settling the terms of
peace, that they were primates among the assembled nations and that they
intended to have their authority acknowledged. This extraordinary
secrecy and arrogation of power by the Council of Four excited
astonishment and complaint throughout the body of delegates to the
Conference, and caused widespread criticism in the press and among the
people of many countries.

A week after the Council of Ten was divided into the Council of the
Heads of States, the official title of the Council of Four, and the
Council of Foreign Ministers, the official title of the Council of Five
(popularly nick-named "The Big Four" and "The Little Five"), I made the
following note on the subject of secret negotiations:

"After the experience of the last three months [January-March, 1919]
I am convinced that the method of personal interviews and private
conclaves is a failure. It has given every opportunity for intrigue,
plotting, bargaining, and combining. The President, as I now see it,
should have insisted on everything being brought before the Plenary
Conference. He would then have had the confidence and support of all
the smaller nations because they would have looked up to him as their
champion and guide. They would have followed him.

"The result of the present method has been to destroy their faith and
arouse their resentment. They look upon the President as in favor of
a world ruled by Five Great Powers, an international despotism of the
strong, in which the little nations are merely rubber-stamps.

"The President has undoubtedly found himself in a most difficult
position. He has put himself on a level with politicians experienced
in intrigue, whom he will find a pretty difficult lot. He will sink
in the estimation of the delegates who are not within the inner
circle, and what will be still more disastrous will be the loss of
confidence among the peoples of the nations represented here. A
grievous blunder has been made."

The views, which I expressed in this note in regard to the unwisdom of
the President's course, were not new at the time that I wrote them. Over
two months before I had watched t