It was always a joy to see Mr. Hughes when he was righteously indignant, and he certainly was so on the afternoon of November 25. He lunged at once at the report of the break between himself and Mr. Balfour. The statement had no basis but the imagination of the writer. It was unjust to Mr. Balfour, who had been coöperative from the start. To put him of all men at the Conference in a position of opposing the United States was most unfair. There had been no clashes in committees, no quarrels. There had, of course, been differences in points of view, candid statements, free explanations, but any one with common sense knew that such exchange of views must take place. It was a fine, generous, convincing answer to the ugly rumors, and the beauty of it was that you believed Mr. Hughes. You knew that he was not lying to you. I believe this to have been the general conviction of the newspaper men. He convinced them and they were all for him. This was a real achievement for any man, for the press craft are hard to convince and quick to suspect. Many of them have been for years in the thick of public affairs, watching men go up and down; seeing heroes made and unmade; the incorruptible prove corruptible. One wonders sometimes not that they have so little faith, but that they have any. They believed Mr. Hughes. When he denied the rumors his word was accepted. But the rumors were out, and had been cabled abroad and were already doing their ugly work there—fighting right and left like mad dogs. There was even riot and bloodshed in Italy over the report that Briand had spoken lightly of their army.
It looked for the moment as if an atmosphere was gathering around the Washington Conference similar to that in which the Paris Conference had done its work. Indeed, already the observer who had been in Paris in 1919, had been more than once startled with the way the two conferences were beginning to parallel each other. Just what happened in Paris had already happened here—a wonderful first stage in which a noble program had been given out—a program to which all the world had responded with joy and hope. Then came a second stage in which the delegates attempted to make their noble ideas realities. It was in this transition period that the first convulsions of public and press began. They saw that, as a matter of fact, the Conference had no magic to practice, that it was nothing but the same old hard effort to work out by conferring, by bargaining, by compromise, the best that they could get. And they saw, too, that most of this work was going on behind closed doors. The moment that the Washington Conference attempted to get down to cases there was the same burst of remonstrance, suspicion, accusation that we saw in Paris. “Secret diplomacy.” Then came rumors of quarrels. If it was secret, must it not have been because there were things that they did not want known outside—breaks in their good will? The rumors of quarrels were spread with relish, and often malice. Dislike of this or that nation flared up, mistrust of this or that man. Washington air was saturated with impatience, suspicion, intrigue. Was the Conference to gather about it the same storm of wicked passions that had been so strong in Paris, doing their best to wreck the work, and frustrating some of the noblest attempts. That dreadful “outside” of the Paris Conference, created by the unreason, hate, vanity and ambitions of men, seemed about to be duplicated. I had never set down my impressions of the Paris atmosphere at the time of the Peace Conference; I would do it now, that I might have it to compare with what seemed to me was about to develop in Washington.