silent too long. If I have, it has been only from a sense of obligation
to an Administration of which I was so long a member. It has not been
through lack of desire to lay the record before the public.

The statements which will be made in the succeeding pages will not be
entirely approved by some of my readers. In the circumstances it is far
too much to expect to escape criticism. The review of facts and the
comments upon them may be characterized in certain quarters as disloyal
to a superior and as violative of the seal of silence which is
considered generally to apply to the intercourse and communications
between the President and his official advisers. Under normal conditions
such a characterization would not be unjustified. But the present case
is different from the usual one in which a disagreement arises between a
President and a high official of his Administration.

Mr. Wilson made our differences at Paris one of the chief grounds for
stating that he would be pleased to take advantage of my expressed
willingness to resign. The manifest imputation was that I had advised
him wrongly and that, after he had decided to adopt a course contrary to
my advice, I had continued to oppose his views and had with reluctance
obeyed his instructions. Certainly no American official is in honor
bound to remain silent under such an imputation which approaches a
charge of faithlessness and of a secret, if not open, avoidance of duty.
He has, in my judgment, the right to present the case to the American
people in order that they may decide whether the imputation was
justified by the facts, and whether his conduct was or was not in the
circumstances in accord with the best traditions of the public service
of the United States.

A review of this sort becomes necessarily a personal narrative, which,