Mr. Hughes himself was partly responsible for the resentment that the press felt at the failure to follow Mr. Balfour’s suggestion and conduct the submarine discussion in the open. Any one who took the pains to read the text of these discussions as they were printed in the leading journals of the country, can see how well adapted they were to a public meeting. There was nothing in them that would jeopardize any nation; there was much in them that would have been illuminated, its impression intensified, if it could have been heard instead of read. Mr. Hughes in his talk of these discussions to the correspondents was actually tantalizing. When he walked briskly into his press conference at the end of a long committee discussion and told a hundred and more men and women gathered around him what an intellectual treat it had been, of how Mr. Balfour had been in his best form, of how lively the exchange had been between French and English, his snapping eyes, his appreciative voice, his glow of enthusiasm, were actually antagonizing. He overlooked entirely the fact that he was making more than one in the assembly say: Selfish man, don’t you suppose that we would have enjoyed seeing and hearing Mr. Balfour in his best form? Is there anything at this Conference that we would have liked so much, except of course hearing you? Do you think we are going to be satisfied with your promise that we shall have full reports of all that was said?
I know very well that it is not considered good form to use the words League of Nations in connection with the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, and no offense is intended—but if one is really interested in trying to decide just how much publicity is wise in such a conference as this, any experience of other similar bodies should be considered, and after all it cannot be denied that the assembly of the League of Nations is a similar body to this, the chief difference being that it includes some fifty nations instead of nine. At the second meeting of the assembly of the League last fall, lasting four and a half weeks, there were 33 plenary conferences. One cannot say that the matters under consideration there were less delicate and dangerous than in Washington. They were even more inflamed at the moment, including such open irruptions as the boundary dispute between Jugo-Slavia and Albania.