The Chinese delegation, which worked vigorously and indefatigably and won over a considerable number of backers, argued that Kiaochow had ceased to belong to Germany on the day when China declared war on that state, inasmuch as all their treaties, including the lease of Kiaochow, were abrogated by that declaration, and the ownership of every rood of Chinese territory held by Germany reverted in law to China, and should therefore be handed over to her, and not to Japan. To this plea Baron Makino returned the answer that with the surrender of Tsingtao to Japan in 1914[249] the whole imperial German protectorates of Shantung had passed to that Power, China being still a neutral. Consequently the entry of China into the war in 1917 could not affect the status of the province which already belonged to Nippon by right of conquest. As a matter of alleged fact, this capture of the protectorates by the Japanese had been specially desired by the British government, in order to prevent Germany from ceding it to China. If that move meant anything, therefore, it meant that neither China nor Germany had or could have any hold on the territory once it was captured by Japan. Further, this conquest was effected at the cost of vast sums of money and two thousand Japanese lives.
Nor was that all. In the year 1915[250] China signed an agreement with Japan, undertaking "to recognize all matters that may be agreed upon between the Japanese government and the German government respecting the disposition of all the rights, interests, and concessions which, in virtue of treaties or otherwise, Germany possesses vis-à-vis China, in relation to the province of Shantung." This treaty, the Chinese delegates answered, was extorted by force. Japan, having vainly sought to obtain it by negotiations that lasted nearly four months, finally presented an ultimatum,[251] giving China forty-eight hours in which to accept it. She had no alternative. But at least she made it known to the world that she was being coerced. It was on the day on which that document was signed that the Japanese representative in Peking sent a spontaneous declaration to the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, promising to return the leased territory to China on condition that all Kiaochow be opened as a commercial port, that a Japanese settlement be established, and also an international settlement, if the Powers desired it, and that an arrangement be made beforehand between the Chinese and Japanese governments with regard to "the disposal of German public establishments and populations, and with regard to other conditions and procedures."
The Japanese further invoked another and later agreement, which was, they alleged, signed by the Chinese without demur.[252] This accord, coming after the entry of China into the war, was tantamount to the renunciation of any rights which China might have believed she possessed as a corollary of her belligerency. It also disposed, the Japanese argued, of her contention that the territory in question is indispensable and vital to her—a contention which Japan met with the promise to deliver it up—and which was invalidated by China's refusal to fight for it in the year 1914. This latter argument was controverted by the Chinese assertion that they were ready and willing to declare war against Germany at the outset, but that their co-operation was refused by the Entente, and subsequently by Japan. This allegation is credible, if we remember the eagerness exhibited by the British government that Japan should lose no time in co-operating with her allies, the representations made by the British Ambassador to Baron Kato on the subject,[253] and the alleged motive to prevent the retrocession of Shantung to China by the German government.
The arguments of China and Japan were summarily put in the following questions by a delegate of each country: "Yes or no, does Kiaochow, whose population is exclusively Chinese, form an integral part of the Chinese state? Yes or no, was Kiaochow brutally occupied by the Kaiser in the teeth of right and justice and to the detriment of the peace of the Far East, and it may be of the world? Yes or no, did Japan enter the war against the aggressive imperialism of the German Empire, and for the purpose of arranging a lasting peace in the Far East? Yes or no, was Kiaochow captured by the English and Japanese troops in 1914 with the sole object of destroying a dangerous naval base? Yes or no, was China's co-operation against Germany, which was advocated and offered by President Yuan Shi Kai in August, 1914, refused at the instigation of Japan?"[254]
The Japanese catechism ran thus: "Yes or no, was Kiaochow a German possession in the year 1914? Yes or no, was the world, including the United States, a consenting party to the occupation of that province by the Germans? Why did China, who to-day insists that that port is indispensable to her, cede it to Germany? Why in 1914 did she make no effort to recover it, but leave this task to the Japanese army? Further, who can maintain that juridically the last war abolished ipso facto all the cessions of territory previously effected? Turkey formerly ceded Cyprus to Great Britain. Will it be argued that this cession is abrogated and that Cyprus must return to Turkey directly and unconditionally? The Conference announced repeatedly that it took its stand on justice and the welfare of the peoples. It is in the name of the welfare of the peoples, as well as in the name of justice, that we assert our right to take over Kiaochow. The harvest to him whose hands soweth the seed."[255]
If we add to all these conflicting data the circumstance that Great Britain, France, and Russia had undertaken[256] to support Japan's demands at the Conference, and that Italy had promised to raise no objection, we shall have a tolerable notion of the various factors of the Chino-Japanese dispute, and of its bearings on the Peace Treaty and on the principles of the Covenant. It was one of the many illustrations of the incompatibility of the Treaty and the Covenant, the respective scopes of which were radically and irreconcilably different. The Supreme Council had to adjudicate upon the matter from the point of view either of the Treaty or of the Covenant; as part of a vulgar bargain of the old, unregenerate days, or as an example of the self-renunciation of the new ethical system. The majority of the Council was pledged to the former way of contemplating it, and, having already promulgated a number of decrees running counter to the Covenant doctrine in favor of their own peoples, could not logically nor politically make an exception to the detriment of Japan.
What actually happened at the Peace Table is still a secret, and President Wilson, who knows its nature, holds that it is in the best interests of humanity that it should so remain! The little that has as yet been disclosed comes mainly from State-Secretary Lansing's answers to the questions put by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. America's second delegate, in answer to the questions with which he was there plied, affirmed that "President Wilson alone approved the Shantung decision, that the other members of the American delegation made no protest against it, and that President Wilson alone knows whether Japan has guaranteed to return Shantung to China."[257] Another eminent American, who claims to have been present when President Wilson's act was officially explained to the Chinese delegates, states that the President, disclosing to them his motives, pleaded that political exigencies, the menace that Japan would abandon the Conference, and the rumor that England herself might withdraw, had constrained him to accept the Shantung settlement in order to save the League.[258] Rumors appear to have played an undue part in the Conference, influencing the judgment or the decisions of the Supreme Council. The reader will remember that it was a rumor to the effect that the Italian government had already published a decree annexing Fiume that is alleged to have precipitated the quarrel between Mr. Wilson and the first Italian delegation. It is worth noting that the alleged menace that Japan would quit the Conference if her demands were rejected was not regarded by Secretary Lansing as serious. "Could Japan's signature to the League have been obtained without the Shantung decision?" he was asked. "I think so," he answered.
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."