Did Mr. Hughes lack tact and understanding when he confined his opening speech to three nations? I think that the after events point that way. To have invited eight nations and to have spoken to but two at the start was a good deal like inviting eight guests to a dining table and talking to but two of them through the meal. The oversight, if that’s the proper word for it, was forgotten, if noticed by any one in the really tremendous thing that Mr. Hughes did. The trouble is that there is almost always one among a number of neglected guests that does feel and does not forget it.
The opening week of the Conference kept France in about the same position that she had on the opening day. She was not yet a principal, and another point—and one that is hard on the French—they saw here what they began to see in Paris in 1919 and so openly resented there—that English is taking the place of French as the language of diplomacy. There is no mistake about this, and I don’t wonder that all Frenchmen resent it. At the opening day every delegate, except M. Briand, spoke in English; the French translations which followed each speech were made purely out of compliment to the French delegation. M. Briand is one of not a few in France who will take no pains, whatever their contracts, to learn a word of English. For the last two years he has been constantly in conference with Lloyd George, he has had most of that time the remarkable interpreter, M. Carmlynck, at his side. I have heard M. Carmlynck say that in all this time M. Briand has not learned a word of English, although Lloyd George, who at the start understood no French at all, is now able to follow closely the arguments in French, and even will at times correct or question the phrasing of the translation into English.
The French are not a race that conceal their feelings. An Englishman, an American, is apt to accuse anybody who does not cover up disappointment, resentment, of being a poor sport. France’s chief contempt for the Anglo-Saxon is that he is not out and out with everything; that he has reticences and reserves, conceals his dislikes, his vices, his emotions. The French showed at Washington from the start that they were disappointed. They did not mix freely; they did not use the ample offices prepared for them in the Annex to the Pan-American Building, where the delegates sat, although every other nation was making more or less use of these quarters. They insisted on conducting all their press meetings in French alone, although every other nation, when it put up somebody who did not speak English, provided a translator. The result was that the French press gatherings were sparsely attended.