Senate Press Gallery, without whom no world conference in the future will be complete, read like this:

10:30 A. M.-Lord Riddell, of the British delegation, in the Navy Building.

11:30 A. M.-Signor Bartelli, of the Italian delegation, at the Italian Embassy.

3:00 P. M.-Lord Riddell, of the British delegation in the Navy Building.

3:30 P. M.-The Secretary of State, Mr. Hughes, at the State Department.

4:30 P. M.-Mr. Hanihara of the Japanese delegation, at the home of the Japanese delegation on Massachusetts Avenue.

5:00 P. M.-Mr. Sze, of the Chinese delegation, at the Navy Building.

6:00 P. M.-Mr. Balfour, of the British delegation, at the Navy Building.

You will observe in this list three heads. of delegations, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Sze. Mr. Hanihara takes the place of Baron Kato, the head of the Japanese delegation, because he speaks English and the Admiral does not. You will observe also three British conferences with the press in one day, to one conference each for the other nationalities. The British talk better and more constantly to the newspaper men than any other people at a conference, even including the Americans, in spite of the wellestablished American custom of "seeing the press" every day.

These newspaper conferences in Washington differed from any other ever held in this one respect. They were open to corre

spondents of every nationality. At Paris, the British held conferences for British journalists, with an occasional conference for the Americans. The Americans held conferences to which only their own country's newspaper representatives were admitted. And so with the other countries.

When this gathering was arranged for, some super-patriot pointed out to Mr. Hughes the immense scandal and danger that would result from admitting Japanese and British journalists to his confidential talks with the American press. "I think I'll chance it," he replied. He did. The others followed his example. And an immensely silly division of the world into little pools of public opinion was ended.

Out of the war, out of the Paris Conference, and more than all out of this Washington Conference there has emerged one big international force more real than leagues of nations or four-power pacts, and that is international public opinion. Mr. Wilson perhaps discovered it when he tried to settle the war by talking across the Atlantic to the peoples of Germany, of Austria and Russia, as well as to those of England and France. When Mr. Hughes called this Conference, he counted on public opinion in this country, in England, in the British colonies, and in Japan, too, more than he did upon the governments of those countries to bring about the results he had in

mind. China put its faith in American public opinion. Great Britain, coming here, thought much of that same opinion and cultivated it assiduously. Japan, less accustomed to popular governments, has felt vaguely about for the opinion to which Mr. Hughes was responsive; and it had its difficulties with its own rising force of public opinion as the unwillingness of the Japanese journalists here to be guided by the Japanese delegates abundantly proved.

Men must always be governed by something bigger than themselves; it may be only a great shadow of themselves projected by the flickering taper of their intelligence upon the vast back drop of events, an anthropomorphic enlargement; mere individual humanity elevated in stature by the Divine Right; corporate humanity-humanity made impressive by the word "Nation"; or, as just now, incorporate humanity similarly magnified and known as Public Opinion; which this Conference more than anything else reveals transcending the haphazard lines and boundaries that the war traced across the surface of the earth. It is not for us journalists, servants of Public Opinion, to speak lightly of the new master. I do not; I merely record that a new amplification of man possesses the minds of men met to govern the earth and that the Great Figure is international.

Mr. Hughes recognized the change in the spirit of international conferences when he plunged into this one with a striking public announcement, the very first day, of the American position upon naval reductions for all three of the great powers. Nothing such as Mr. Hughes did had ever been done before. He spoke not to the delegates assembled in Continental Hall but to the whole world to focus public opinion before anyone else had a chance to play with it; and so effectively that the Japanese correspondents put his entire address on the cable at $1.50 a word for Japanese newspaper readers.

An international conference is not a place where men meet and trade their national wares. It is only the center of something that is going on everywhere, in every capitol, on every telegraph wire, in every newspaper, in every clubroom and drawing-room where politics is discussed. That is why it is so hard to put your finger on one spot and say, "This is the Conference." The assembled delegates listen to what comes from the ends of the earth. They bow to Public Opinion and they distrust Public Opinion. They seek to know Public Opinion and to make Public Opinion. They put out whole truths and half truths and whole untruths, facts and propaganda. They use and they abuse the journalists who serve their ends and defeat their ends. And at last there emerges a commise, which embodies about all the justice ht that is humanly possible.

What he did on that day may never again be repeated. Other ways of focusing world opinion will be invented as conferences multiply. Moreover, methods are largely personal and this was distinctly the Hughes method. It is the one he has followed all his public life. He moves opinion largely, directly, and by single strokes.

He is not a bold man in spite of his manner. He is a cautious man with a bold attack. Better at dealing with man in the aggregate than with men as individuals, he addresses himself to a whole State, a whole nation, a whole world, when he can, rather than to the persons whom he has immediately to influence. A bolder man than he would have followed up his stroke on the Navy with an equally vigorous one upon the problems of the East. A man possessed and raised abov himself by a great idea, a great hope, would have run head down against the impossible everywhere as Mr. Wilson did at Paris. Mr. Hughes, however, is a practical man, with a taking air of impracticality, a cold man with the dramatic manner of passion, a realist with the address of an idealist; he takes few chances as if he were taking all.

It is the fashion to speak of the Big Three in every conference. There was a Big Three at Paris. There was a Big Three at Washington. But I want to speak first of the Big One. I don't mean by this that the Secretary of State surpassed Mr. Balfour in subtlety or Baron Kato in strength of will, or that these two men, one by his discreet diplomacy and the other by his solid firmness, did not shape the result as much

because Mr. Hughes felt that after Paris this was the day of small beginnings. He must run no risk of repeating Mr. Wilson's failure. He must persuade the people by success, and he has his success, within limits set by himself-a saving in naval budgets, an organization of the powers with Eastern interests to promote mutual understanding.

The "Big One" and the "Big Three"

Presiding at the open sessions of the Conference, Mr. Hughes was a distinguished figure. The delegates sat at tables arranged to form a hollow square. Mr. Hughes sat at the center of the table, in the end of the hall toward the stage. He was the center of attention, doing most of the talking, with that perfect command of himself, that clear sense of what he was going to say, which is characteristic of him. He suggested power, to an extent which Mr. Clemenceau, a much harder and more inflexible man presiding similarly at Paris, never suggested it. It was partly illusion; the most detached of us cannot wholly put away his national illusions. It was partly staging, voluntary subordination elsewhere. It reminded me of the Italian publicity man's calling us all into a conference to assure us that whatever was to be done the initiative must come from the United States.

took engagements not to talk too literally, was too responsible, tells the truth too habitually to be a good leak. He was

terribly outleaked.

As I pass on from the Big One to the Big Three, I must quote what one of the leading English correspondents said to me of Mr. Balfour: "It is a new Balfour at this conference." Certainly as you heard the British chief delegate's voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for the first time in his life, you realized that it was not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" as the London Nation expressed it, who was speaking. It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great revival meeting.

The larger conference, with the press of the world, with public opinion, to everyone's surprise slipped out of Mr. Hughes' hands. Here it was supposed that the Secretary would be strong, but here he was weak. To his credit be it said, perhaps due to his early training, he does not exist comfortably in the atmosphere of half-lies that surrounds a conference. Mr. Hughes was unhappy, almost angry, at times. The press was unsparing. "Why," he was asked, "can we obtain information from other delegations but not from you?" He sought to know himself. "Oh," he was told "we thought all this information came from you."

Probably he made a mistake in trying to handle publicity himself. A delegation, so long as the press is avid for information and misinformation, should have a leak conveniently arranged, sufficiently remote and irresponsible. Mr. Hughes was too close in,

I suspect that he will go back to England and shore up "The Foundations of Belief," which foundations one of the American delegates, complimenting the author, said he had found "rather slender." Mr. Balfour has been all his life the kind of man who delights to believe on foundations "rather slender." A more emotional man would thicken the foundations with imagination.

Mr. Balfour has been a man of vast disillusions. He has been detached. He wears a detached cravat, a black bow with both ends tucked under a wide turn-down collar, unlike anything mere men wear. He made his first speech in a detached manner, as if no one else were present, clutching both lapels of his coat in his hands and looking at the sky through his wide-rimmed glasses, unmindful of the fact that a brick wall cut off his vision.

In personal relations, Mr. Balfour is charming, because he has the flattering way of surrendering his detachment and showing interest. In regard to the United States he is no longer detached. Perhaps it is "blood is thicker than water" that warms his voice. He is a "new Balfour."

Baron Kato, the other member of the Big Three, was the Clemenceau of the conference. In spite of not speaking English, in spite of not being the nominal head of the Japanese delegation, in spite of being a naval officer in a political conference, he made himself Japan's chief representative. He was the hardest fighter; his was the strongest will in the Big Three. He is the