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On January 15 [1919] Mr. Lloyd George complains of insinuations published in certain French newspapers. President Wilson goes even further, and although representing a country in which censorship had been abolished immediately following the armistice, asks that the French censorship should be exercised not only over the French newspapers but also over despatches sent to foreign papers. M. Clemenceau opposes a friendly refusal. From Tardieu's "The Truth About the Treaty."

T

WHOLLY disapprove of what you say-and will defend your right to say it to the death," wrote Voltaire to Helvetius on the publication of the latter's famous book "On the Mind."

It is amazing to those few Americans who were present in Paris during the Peace Conference that so little of what was common knowledge there was not only not known in America, but has not been made known here even to this day. Have the people of America realized, for instance, to what a great extent the censorship in practice in Paris, exercised mainly at the specific request of Mr. Wilson, was responsible for the failure of the Conference to agree upon a Treaty and a League of Nations plan compatible with both American and European Allied,public opinion?

Yet the fact is that America was prevented from knowing the true light in which Europe regarded Mr. Wilson and his methods, and the French press was not permitted to inform the French people how America looked upon Mr. Wilson's foreign adventuring and programme.

Their "right to say it" was not only denied, but active repression was actually put in force by the one man who was most obligated to protect their right to hear and to say.

I sat at the desk of the distinguished French publicist "Pertinax," of the "Echo de Paris," when he showed me scores of cablegrams from his Washington correspondent, Mr. Judson Welliver, blue-penciled by the French censor, whole sentences often struck out, sometimes half or all of the message suppressed, including a speech of Senator Lodge in the Senate on the League of Nations, and a paragraph of one of Mr. Wickersham's Paris messages to the New York "Tribune," cabled back for reproduction in Paris.

Pertinax said:

"About a month before the Peace Conference opened a strongly worded note was received by the French Government from the State Department at Washington, requesting them to give instructions that cablegrams sent over to America by American correspondents in Paris should not be submitted to any kind of censorship. This request was gladly granted, and for a time the American correspondents in Paris, as Iwell as their British colleagues, enjoyed complete freedom in communicating with their papers.

BY WADE CHANCE

"However, the Peace Conference had not been at work for a week, and the Russian problem was being discussed, when Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George took exception to the amount of publicity the debates were given in the French press. They wished the exchange of opinion preceding the decisions to be kept secret, and the results only to be published. Mr. Lloyd George said:

"I have come here with the idea that I shall have to change my point of view many times, and I do not want it to be said that I had to give away on such and such points.' When the armistice terms were being renewed, Mr. Wilson said:

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"Why do you allow your press to speak so frankly about my policies and make it impossible for me to make any concessions to you?'

"Following this, M. Clemenceau, yielding to pressure, made the famous decision not to allow anything to be published in the French press besides the official communiqué. However, he asked Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George to guarantee that the American and British press would be treated on the same terms. Both of them stated that they were unable to give such assurances, as the question was too serious to be decided offhand.

"On the following morning, however, the French papers, as a consequence of the warning, were very reticent. At the next sitting Clemenceau and Pichon said they would be unable to apply such a strict censorship if the American and British press continued to enjoy more favored treatment.

"In the meantime, it had been published in the French press that henceforth nothing would be said of what would take place in the secret meetings, and the impression it made in France and abroad was most unfavorable. In order to counteract it, and knowing well that they were responsible, Wilson and Lloyd George proposed that the whole question of publicity should be referred to the press itself-hence the very confusing debate which took place at a conference of the Allied journalists.

"The outcome was the decision that the press should be admitted at the plenary sittings of the Conference. But a reservation on this point was made by Mr. Wilson himself, and he wrote with his own hand on a slip of paper and handed it to the other leaders the suggestion that when necessary even the plenary sittings should be held in

camera.

"The whole policy, then, was quite plain. A great show of publicity was to be made in a few instances when solemn and empty debates took place, but the real sittings of the leading men of the Conference, when the real work of the Conference was done, was to be kept hidden from the world.

"A few days before Mr. Wilson sailed back to America (the first time) he

again protested against publicity, and a real censorship is being exercised over the French press. It should interest the American public to know that the French Censorship Bureau enjoys the assistance of two American officials, whose duty it is to advise as to modifying or admitting any expression of opinion which French publicists might make on American policies as expressed by Mr. Wilson. Here is a case in point:

"Last October I said in a leading article that President Wilson had refused to help the Czechoslovaks struggling on the river Volga. The French censor asked for the suppression of the passage, and since we refused, he called to his rescue his two American colleagues, detailed for the purpose, who then came to me with an air which plainly showed they did not relish their extraordinary task.

"As to cablegrams from our Washington correspondent suppressed here by our own censors, but to meet the wishes of Mr. Wilson, after Mr. Wilson's arrival in France several French papers printed communications from their Washington correspondents, American citizens who reported the trend in Congress on Mr. Wilson's policies, such as speeches by Senator Lodge and other leaders. Very soon it was known that these cablegrams had a very disturbing effect on the distinguished visitor at the Hôtel Murat and his entourage, and shortly after the censor cut out more and more of our American cablegrams. Here you see dozens of them which have been blue-penciled. These messages, moreover, did not contain any criticism originating from our own correspondents; they were in most instances merely reports of speeches in Congress, and no instructions whatever had been given our correspondents to take any line contrary to Mr. Wilson.

"The result of this form of 'open diplomacy' has been that France has been led to believe that America indorses Mr. Wilson's policies to the last man, and, moreover, French opinion as expressed in the French press has been represented throughout America as being unanimously in favor of Mr. Wilson's policies. In that way public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic has been prevented from free interchange from day to day, thereby to bring about that close approximation of view-point which is of such great value, and which alone makes mutual agreement and understanding possible.

"We have been mutually duped as to each other's views and feelings, and it is plain, therefore, that the consequences must be regrettable."

This fateful prophecy of “Pertinax” was uttered on February 15, 1918. Warnings of this state of things were sent to America by myself and other correspondents at the time. They were never published, granting they arrived.

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T

HE best and biggest news story from the natural history world is that beavers are coming back. They are coming back rapidly, they are multiplying in numbers, and they are also extending their land and water holdings. A few years ago they were verging on extermination. Now they are reoccupying the land of their fathers.

Some years ago I examined a beautiful hay meadow on a mountain ranch and found it a beaver-made meadow. It was a filled-in beaver pond. One corner of the old pond site was forested. This beaver work covered more than forty acres. The landowner writes me that this site has again and suddenly become a beaver pond. He is willing to donate a number of reservoir sites, but not this particular one.

In the Museum at Albany there is, or was a few years ago, a statue of a giant beaver. He was one of a numerous tribe which inhabited New York State a half million years ago. Beavers may rightfully be called the first settlers of America. They were the first large house-builders. This coming back is an expansion, a reoccupying of beaver territory. The buffalo are also coming back, multiplying, and extending their stamping-grounds. Both the beaver and the buffalo are Americans, and not foreign immigrants. The beaver nation in New York State was already old and numbered millions when the first European colonists came. The topography of the State was corrugated with beaver dams when New Amsterdam was built. When Henry Hudson looked upon the Palisades there must have been at least a million beavers at the sources of the

Hudson. The present population probably does not exceed twenty thousand. They can keep coming back for some time before they attain the peak of their former population or repossess their former territory.

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, there were perhaps two hundred million beavers in America. If on a river map of North America for 1620 you place a line of dots as thick as they will show along every stream from source to sea, these dots will not be nearly numerous enough to indicate former beaver colonies.

The lower Mississippi, the lower Colorado, and a few other streams may have had too many alligators for beavers. And beavers were not on areas in the Bad Lands, nor above the tree line. But these areas embrace only a small percentage of the area of the country. However, along numerous streams for miles instead of one line of dots there should be several lines, with an occasional cluster of dots.

There now are cities with paved streets upon the sites of former Venetian beaver colonies. There are miles and miles of grain fields, innumerable orchards, leagues of forests, meadows dotted with cattle, and farms, homes, and schools now in possession of most of the territory where clustered beaver ponds sparkled across the continent in the sun.

Beaver ponds caused at least a mill ion acres of land to be overspread with the richest of soil-alluvial sediment from streams.

But soil, the earth's greatest resource, is the chief contribution of beavers to National prosperity. Beaver works

A BEAVER DAM

through the ages not only enriched but enormously extended the agricultural area of our land. In beaver ponds accumulated a vast area of our productive soil.

Beaver ponds are short lived. In a few years they wash full of sediment and soil. The beaver pond of to-day is a fertile field to-morrow. Buried and forgotten in our land are millions of beaver ponds. These during primeval years furnished plant food for grass and flowers and forests. This soil now is the life of the land and we possess it. Each spring countless sowers go forth to sow, each autumn there is the thrill of harvest home in countless golden fields and mirth and merriment among the rows of red-cheeked apples, where beaver ponds once sparkled amid primeval scenes.

Our beaver inheritance is monumental, and a monument honoring beavers would have a fitting place in every valley to which beavers are returning and in countless thousands to which they have not returned.

"Our first engineers"-beavers-had a beneficial influence on the flow of many streams. Their settling basins-pondsprecipitated the sediment upstream and prevented this going down to clog the deep-water channels.

Beaver ponds and dams compel floods to drive slow; they absorb flood shock and water excess. They delay the runoff. Each beaver pond is a poetic and perennial spring. From the toll of floods, from the excess of rainy days, it distributes to the stream every day. A beaver pond helps give clear water and sustaining flow.

The depositing of sediment, the

A BEAVER ON A BEAVER HOUSE

ing and the distributing of water, give beavers a place for consideration in deep waterway plans and in river and harbor appropriations. Beavers help reduce the billions of tons of sediment which we are told is annually swept into the sea or dropped in the lower slugggish channels of rivers-to hold up shipping and to add fire to the profanity of steamboat captains.

The present superior races that possess the former beaver empire have warranty deeds to this land, and in many cases the beavers that come back to it will be resisted, be treated as invaders.

Through the years I have written much concerning beavers, and their coming back has consequently brought me letters by the dozen. Many of the writers consider the new-coming beaver as a pest; they have tried to drive him off and have with amazement found him efficient and persistent in staying where he has settled.

One Western farmer writes that the beavers shut off his irrigation water when he needed it and turned this onto his neighbor's land up ditch at a time the neighbor did not want it. Both these men want "beavers to attend to their own affairs." The man up the canal says that his forty bee stands were turned into house-boats and that the water setting for his hay shocks caused his alfalfa field to look like a swarm of beaver houses.

The Indians spoke of the beaver as the fellow that cuts down trees. With less admiration a number of orchard owners are likewise speaking of him. Beavers have invaded apple, peach, and plum orchards and, regardless, felled trees right and left. Of course they felled these for a purpose and not for the fun of it. But the damage done was nevertheless one hundred per cent.

An owner of extensive orchards on the banks "where rolls the Oregon" came to see me. He now writes that the recommended chicken wire has thus far completely stopped beaver depredations,

but that two miles of chicken wire is a heavy expense.

Incidentally and of tremendous interest is the fact that many of these humans protesting vehemently and justly against beaver activities are living on territory formerly occupied by beavers. The earth in which two orchards are growing, the alfalfa land, and even the wild flowers contributing to the forty stands of bees are all in soil deposited in ancient beaver ponds.

One mountain man with numerous groves and brooks on his none too productive place has suddenly found himself possessed by, or in possession of, several colonies and dozens of beaver inhabitants. It will not pay to dislodge the beavers. Why not, I wrote him, accept this gift and advertise a valuable fur farm for sale?

Two water-power companies report good results. They brought in beaver immigrants, and these colonized the stream sources which supply them with water.

A number of fishermen have written that increased numbers of beaver ponds offer fish excellent opportunities to multiply and come back.

I visited two mountain homesteaders who were having their troubles in trying to dispossess the original beavers. Beavers had felled a large cottonwood tree upon a small homestead cabin. An adjacent neighbor had built a fence along a stream. The posts used were green, bark-covered aspens. Every post was cut down and dragged off by the beavers.

Dams are emphatic in letters from the Eastern States. Highway commissioners denounce beavers for flooding roadways, for holding up the traffic. Section foremen and road overseers charge beavers with maliciously and repeatedly filling culverts with trash-so that these culverts were out of commission at the time flood waters needed exclusive use. Farm lands are flooded and stream sides turned into swamps, acres of forest trees drowned, and a general damaging disregard shown for riparian rights, trespass signs, and contempt for the customs, possession, and the land titles of the landowners.

I, too, have had and am having first-hand experiences-twenty-odd new beaver ponds near my cabin in four years. Let one of these ponds be expanded-and that is normal with a beaver pond-and I shall know whether my ponderous stone fireplace foundation will stand submergence.

The beaver has been the star figure in the story of America. He was the beginning of numerous individual fortunes and he looms large when we look at the foundations of our vast National wealth.

Atlantic coast colonists used beaver skins for currency. Beaver trappers carried the star of empire westward. They were explorers, and sent back word of rich resources waiting everywhere beyond the frontier. The first permanent settlements in perhaps one-third of the States in the Union were made by beaver trappers. Though largely indi

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