say a few words upon matters of public interest; and even on some occasions to talk at length personally with individual correspondents. But in the very midst of the Great War, at a time when our own relations with Germany were becoming so strained that our entry into the war became daily more probable, and when a single phrase or word from the President would have been of inestimable interest, he shut himself absolutely away from all contact with the men upon whom the nation had to depend for information concerning the progress of public affairs, and a little later ceased to receive individual newspaper men. We have it upon the authority of that writer who is perhaps his most earnest advocate and most ardent defender against hostile criticism, that not once since May, 1916, has the President met correspondents collectively, and that not once in the past year has he received one of them individually.

This attitude of aloofness cannot be attributed to any reluctance toward publicity, since the President has repeatedly assured us that a desire for the fullest possible publicity for all governmental business is one of the dominant passions of his life. Neither can it be explained on the ground of lack of time, for he has often been engaged in trivialities at the very hour when such a meeting with correspondents would have been most desirable. There remains, then, the explanation which has been given by his journalistic eulogist already quoted, to wit, that he does not think the people are or, shall we say, ought to be?-interested in public affairs. For we are explicitly told that he refuses to consider the activities of the press as manifestations of the desire of the people for information on public affairs, but rather of the mere idle curiosity of individual reporters.

There may be, also, this explanation of an explanation, that he thinks that the people ought to be satisfied with the creelings which are officially emitted from the Committee of Public Information, and ought not to ask more. We remember that at about the time when he adopted the policy of shutting himself away from newspaper men the President, deliberately discussing the war which had then been going on for nearly two years, declared that "With its causes and objects we are not concerned. The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or explore." Perhaps he applied that same rule to the public in its attitude toward his adminis

tration and its policies; holding that with them it was not concerned, and that it should not search or explore beyond the boundaries of the "Official Bulletin " provided by his creel.

The unfortunate impressions which were inevitably produced by this course of the President were recently much deepened by two almost simultaneous incidents, of official origin. One of these was the sudden and unexpected taking over by the Administration of the various transoceanic cables and wireless telegraph systems. This was done, of course, as a war measure. It could not have been done otherwise. Yet it was not done until the President himself had assured us that the war was ended. There had apparently been no need of it during many months of strenuous warfare, when need of most cautious supervision of all means of communication with Europe was plausibly manifest. But as soon as the enemy surrendered and the armistice was signed, the President, or his Politicalmaster General, perceived a most imperative need for it. It may, of course, have been the purest coincidence, absolutely accidental, that it was just at that time that the President decided to go to Europe to impress his policies upon the Peace Conference. It may be that between the two there was not the slightest relationship. But this is an incredulous and skeptical world, containing many former residents of Missouri.

The other incident was the sending of Mr. George Creel and his staff abroad to be in Paris during the President's visit and during the sessions of the Peace Congress. There was an instant and natural assumption, which we cannot regard as either extravagant or unwarranted, that this Committee on Public Information was to exercise some sort of censorship, control or supervision over the transmission of news to this country. If not, indeed, why should Mr. Creel go over there at all? True, it has since been announced that there will be no censorship and no bar on news. Official government business will have the first place for transmission; news will stand second; and commercial and miscellaneous business will come last. That is as it should be. Yet we assume that messages sent by Mr. Creel, as of the Committee on Public Information, will be classed as official business and will thus have the preference over mere newspaper correspondence; and we can imagine a possibility of his having so much to send at a given time that press matter would be badly delayed.

It is further announced that " the machinery of the Committee on Public Information will be used entirely to facilitate the work of the American newspaper representatives in Paris." If, for example, the Congress should decide to hold its meetings in secret, excluding the correspondents, Mr. Creel might, as a sort of ex officio member of the Congress, serve as the medium through which accounts of its doings, "elaborated" in his well known and justly esteemed style, might leak out to the otherwise baffled pressmen. For such service the representatives of what he calls "nasty newspapers" would doubtless be most grateful. Even our Congress would rejoice to get its news of the peace-making deliberations by the grace of the courteous gentleman who publicly likened its heart and mind to slums.

We repeat that this train of incidents, colored throughout by the attitude of the President himself, irresistibly and quite warrantably provokes wonderment as to whether the Socialistic and paternal policy of the Administration, in addition to Government ownership of railroads, ships, telegraphs, telephones, coal and iron and copper mines, oil wells, water power, forest, and Heaven knows what not, comprises also government control of the newspaper press. If so, more than ever we demur. The American people demur to any proposal for a "reptile press." It was not for nothing that the founders of the Republic placed the freedom of the press among the fundamental principles upon which the nation is based; and we do not believe that the nation to-day is any more minded to abandon that principle than it is to abandon trial by jury or the electoral franchise.

THE ENTENTE OF FREE NATIONS

BY DAVID JAYNE HILL

In every period of warfare since modern nations came into existence, there have been serious reflections upon the cost and the horrors of war which have culminated in schemes for preventing it altogether. Some of these have been merely abstract theories regarding the manner in which international conflicts could be obviated or rendered impossible; while others have been of a more pragmatic character, aiming to create in the realm of actuality a situation which would safeguard the interests of peace and possibly of justice.

Among the devices of a purely theoretical order, one of the most notable, suggested by the struggle between the House of Hapsburg with the rest of Europe, was the “Great Design" which the Duke of Sully, in 1634, attributed to Henry IV of France, but which it is now clearly established was not conceived by that monarch and appears to have been invented by the fallen minister himself as a means of procuring his own recall to the administration of the affairs of his country. All Europe, according to this plan, was to be organized into fifteen states, which together should constitute one Christian Republic in which wars were to be prevented by a General Council, composed of forty delegates, meeting annually in the most central cities of the different countries in rotation. The Thirty Years' War, which was ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had already elicited Emeric Crucé's Nouveau Cynée, written in 1623, in which the Republic of Venice was proposed as a place where a permanent corps of ambassadors should reside and by their votes settle all international affairs. Hugo Grotius, perceiving that such settlements could not be made except upon the basis of previously accepted rules or principles, in 1625 had given the world his De Jure Belli ac Pacis, the first con

siderable treatise on the Law of Nations; and to this he had added the proposal of "some kind of body in whose assemblies the quarrels of each one might be terminated by the judgment of others not interested", and that “means be sought to constrain the parties to agree to reasonable conditions." In like manner, the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, was accompanied by the elaborate Projet de la Paix Perpétuelle of the Abbé Saint-Pierre, in which he proposed the formation of a universal alliance of sovereigns to secure them against the misfortunes of war by abolishing the separate use of force, perfecting their laws, and submitting their differences to judicial decision; with a provision that a refractory sovereign who violated a treaty or refused to accept a judgment, should be brought to terms by the others arming against him and charging to his account the expense of the operation. The Napoleonic Wars also brought their contribution of plans for international peace, the most conspicuous effort being that of Immanuel Kant, in 1796, in his essay on "Eternal Peace", in which the solution offered by this Prussian philosopher was that all states should become republican in form; a condition, as he thought, which would enable them by some kind of general federation to unite their forces for the preservation of peace.

It is not surprising, therefore, that, as a result of the defeat of the aggressors in the Great War now, as we hope, happily terminated by the united efforts of a group of advanced and liberal nations, these plans, or modifications of them, should again receive attention, and that a general desire should be created for " some kind of body , as Grotius expressed the aspiration, which could prevent the repetition of the experience through which the world has passed.

What was impossible before the Great War, it is believed by many, could be easily accomplished now; and that, therefore, even before a peace is finally concluded, and as an essential part of it and a condition of its perpetuity, a "League of Nations" should be formed.

There are, it is true, wide differences of opinion regarding the objects, the methods, the organization, and the obligations of such a league, varying from the creation of a World State by the federation of the existing nations into one vast political organism including all, both small and great, to a limited compact confined to a few Powers with no function beyond the peaceable adjudication of differences by an inter