The decision caused tremendous excitement among the Chinese and their numerous friends.  At first they professed skepticism and maintained that there must be some misunderstanding, and finally they protested and refused to sign the Treaty.  One of the American journals published in Paris wrote:  “Shantung was at least a moral explosion.  It blew down the front of the temple, and now everybody can see that behind the front there was a very busy market.  The morals were the morals of a horse trade.  If the muezzin were loud and constant in his calls to prayer, it probably was to drown the sound of the dickering in the market.  There is no longer any obligation upon this nation to accept the Covenant as a moral document.  It is not."[259]

All that may be perfectly true, but it sounds odd that the discovery should not have been made until Japan’s claim was admitted formally to take over Shantung, after she had solemnly promised to restore it to China.  The Covenant was certainly transgressed long before this, and much more flagrantly than by President Wilson’s indorsement of Japan’s demand for the formal retrocession of Shantung.  But by those infractions nobody seemed scandalized. Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. Debts of gratitude had to be paid at the expense of the Covenant, and people closed their eyes or their lips.  It was not until the Japanese asked for something which all her European allies considered to be her right that an outcry was raised and moral principles were invoked.

The Japanese press was nowise jubilant over the finding of the Supreme Council.  The journals of all parties argued that their country was receiving no more than had already been guaranteed to it by China, and ratified by the Allies before the Peace Conference met, and to have obtained what was already hers by rights of conquest and of treaties was anything but a triumph.  What Japan desired was to have herself recognized practically, not merely in theory, as the nation which is the most nearly interested in China, and therefore deserving of a special status there.  In other words, she aimed at the proclamation of something in the nature of a Far Eastern doctrine analogous to that of Monroe.  As priority of interest had been conceded to her by the Ishii-Lansing Agreement with the United States, it was in this sense that her press was fain to construe the clause respecting non-interference with “regional understandings.”

That policy is open.  The principles underlying it, always tenable, were never more so than since the Peace Conference set the Great Powers to direct the lesser states.  Moreover, Japan, it is argued, knows by experience that China has always been a temptation to the Western peoples.  They sent expeditions to fight her and divided her territory into zones of influence, although China was never guilty of an aggressive attitude toward them, as she was toward Japan.  They were actuated by land greed and all that that implies, and if China were abandoned to