“No plan of work has been prepared.  Unless something is done we will be here for many weeks, possibly for months.  After the President’s remarks the other day about a draft-treaty no one except the President would think of preparing a plan.  He must do it himself, and he is not doing it.  He has not even given us a list of subjects to be considered and of course has made no division of our labors.

“If the President does not take up this matter of organization and systematically apportion the subjects between us, we may possibly have no peace before June.  This would be preposterous because with proper order and division of questions we ought to have a treaty signed by April first.

“I feel as if we, the Commissioners, were like a lot of skilled workmen who are ordered to build a house.  We have the materials and tools, but there are no plans and specifications and no master-workman in charge of the construction.  We putter around in an aimless sort of way and get nowhere.

“With all his natural capacity the President seems to lack the faculty of employing team-work and of adopting a system to utilize the brains of other men.  It is a decided defect in an executive.  He would not make a good head of a governmental department.  The result is, so far as our Commission is concerned, a state of confusion and uncertainty with a definite loss and delay through effort being undirected.”

On several occasions I spoke to the President about a programme for the work of the Commission and its corps of experts, but he seemed indisposed to consider the subject and gave the impression that he intended to call on the experts for his own information which would be all that was necessary.  I knew that Colonel House, through Dr. Mezes, the head of the organization, was directing the preparation of certain data, but whether he was doing so under the President’s directions I did not know, though I presumed such was the case.  Whatever data were furnished did not, however, pass through the hands of the other Commissioners who met every morning in my office to exchange information and discuss matters pertaining to the negotiations and to direct the routine work of the Commission.

It is difficult, even with the entire record of the proceedings at Paris before one, to find a satisfactory explanation for the President’s objection to having a definite programme other than the general declarations contained in the Fourteen Points and his “subsequent addresses.”  It may be that he was unwilling to bind himself to a fixed programme, since it would restrict him, to an extent, in his freedom of action and prevent him from assuming any position which seemed to him expedient at the time when a question arose during the negotiations.  It may be that he did not wish to commit himself in any way to the contents of a treaty until the Covenant of the League of Nations had been accepted.  It may be that he preferred not to let the American Commissioners know his views, as they would then be in a position to take an active part in the informal discussions which he apparently wished to handle alone.  None of these explanations is at all satisfactory, and yet any one of them may be the true one.