I haven't any more patience with a man who will ask me to join Japan and connive at the destruction of Korea and the ruin of China than I would have for a man who would ask me to do any other wholly unrighteous and unpatriotic act." Ex-President Taft, in an article published in the Washington Post of July 28th, says: "The outburst in the senate by Senator Borah and others with respect to the Shantung province is not, of course, as "highly unimportant" as Senator Reed's cry of negro domination or Senator Sherman's fright at the restoration of the temporal power of the Pope has become. But in the end this new issue is not likely to affect the ratification of the treaty.

"The exact facts in respect to the Shantung matter have not been set forth as clearly and fully as could be desired. What Germany had in China was granted her by China at the time of the Boxer troubles by way of an indemnity for the killing of her minister, Baron Kettler, and was one of the concessions to foreign powers which grew out of the rising against the foreigners in the time of the dowager empress. That which Germany seems to have secured was a lease, with political and exclusive dominion for 100 years, over the town of Kiaochow, with 50,000 inhabitants together with the economic right to construct a railway through the province of Shantung, which Germany and China should jointly operate and which Germany might police.

"The superficial area over which Germany was given absolute political dominion was about 200 square miles." 