May 3, 1919

Today there is undeniably a crisis in our archives. There simply isn’t any more room in our safe for the countless memoranda that I have drawn up and the innumerable statements that I have taken down from the authorized Ukrainian delegates and from the free-lance volunteers who also abound. I will not assert that what they have had to say has gone entirely unheeded by the commissioners, but it has not been as carefully weighed as in my opinion it should have been. In my judgment, if we are to bring the blessings of peace to Eastern Europe, forty million of its inhabitants should not be ignored. But what was I to do with this mass of neglected and also I must admit often quite contradictory information? This dossier weighs about ten pounds, and now that the safe is jammed full, where can I stow it away?

Fortunately, an hour ago a “directive” came from Captain Patterson, the “executive officer” of our ship, the Crillon. He urges us not to throw into the wastepaper baskets memos and papers “that have outlived their usefulness” (what a charming way of putting it). He warns us that even in the precincts of our closely guarded domain the presence of spies is suspected. “Take your papers down to the cellar, personally,” he urges, “and stand by the furnace until they are incinerated.”

Well, I obeyed Captain “Dick’s” injunction. I took the papers down to the cellar and placed them with my own hands in the furnace that was red hot; and then a surprising thing happened. The Ukrainian dossier did not go up in flames—it simply curled up and smoked and shouldered. When I reported this to the Colonel, he said, “I hope that is not prophetic.” And so do I, but I have my doubts. The pleas and the supplications of forty million people have been, to put it mildly, disregarded; they will shoulder on and someday, perhaps at a moment even more inopportune than the present, they may break out into flames that will spread. I hope the League will do better by the problem and the opportunity than we have done.