Among the solutions of the burning questions which exercised the ingenuity and tested the good faith of the leading Powers at the Peace Conference, none was more rapidly reached there, or more bitterly assailed outside, than those in which Japan was specially interested.  The storm that began to rage as soon as the Supreme Council’s decision on the Shantung issue became known did not soon subside.  Far from that, it threatened for a time to swell into a veritable hurricane.  This problem, like most of those which were submitted to the forum of the Conference, may be envisaged from either of two opposite angles of survey; from that of the future society of justice-loving nations, whose members are to forswear territorial aggrandizement, special economic privileges, and political sway in, or at the expense of, other countries; or from the traditional point of view, which has always prevailed in international politics and which cannot be better described than by Signor Salandra’s well-known phrase “sacred egotism.”  Viewed in the former light, Japan’s demand for Shantung was undoubtedly as much a stride backward as were those of the United States and France for the Monroe Doctrine and the Saar Valley respectively.  But as the three Great Powers had set the example, Japan was resolved from the outset to rebel against any decree relegating her to the second-or third-class nations.  The position of equality occupied by her government among the governments of other Great Powers did not extend to the Japanese nation among the other nations.  But her statesmen refused to admit this artificial inferiority as a reason for descending another step in the international hierarchy and they invoked the principle of which Britain, France, and America had already taken advantage.

The Supreme Council, like Janus of old, possessed two faces, one altruistic and the other egotistic, and, also like that son of Apollo, held a key in its right hand and a rod in its left.  It applied to the various states, according to its own interest or convenience, the principles of the old or the new Covenant, and would fain have dispossessed Japan of the fruits of the campaign, and allotted to her the role of working without reward in the vineyard of the millennium, were it not that this policy was excluded by reasons of present expediency and previous commitments.  The expediency was represented by President Wilson’s determination to obtain, before returning to Washington, some kind of a compact that might be described as the constitution of the future society of nations, and by his belief that this instrument could not be obtained without Japan’s adherence, which was dependent on her demand for Shantung being allowed.  And the previous commitments were the secret compacts concluded by Japan with Britain, France, Russia, and Italy before the United States entered the war.