Now I have sometimes a very cheering thought. On the fifth of March, 1921, I am going to begin to be an historian again instead of an active public man, and I am going to have the privilege of writing about these gentlemen without any restraints of propriety. The President, if my experience is a standard, is liable some day to burst by merely containing restrained gases. Anybody in the Senate or House can say any abusive thing he pleases about the President, but it shocks the sense of propriety of the whole country if the President says what he thinks about them. And that makes it very fortunate that the term of the President is limited, because no president could stand it for a number of years. But when the lid is off, I am going to resume my study of the dictionary to find adequate terms in which to describe the fatuity of these gentlemen with their poor little minds that never get anywhere but run around in a circle and think they are going somewhere. I cannot express my contempt for their intelligence, but because I think I know the people of the United States, I can predict their future with absolute certainty. I am not concerned as to the ultimate outcome of this thing at all, not for a moment, but I am concerned that the outcome should be brought about immediately, just as promptly as possible. So my hope is that we will all put on our war paint, not as Democrats but as Americans, get the true American pattern of war paint and a real hatchet and go out on the war path and get a collection of scalps that has never been excelled in the history of American warfare. CHAPTER XXXVIII JAPAN—SHANTUNG One of the settlements embodied in the Versailles Treaty upon which the enemies of the President in this country concentrated their fires of wrath and hatred against the President was the so-called Shantung settlement. The partisan enemies of the President, realizing the irreconcilable antagonism of certain of our people to the Japanese, did everything they could to intensify this antagonism, picturing the President as one who had conceded something to Japan at the expense of helpless China. Not love of China, but hatred of Woodrow Wilson led partisan Republicans, without careful investigation of the actual situation, to seize on the Shantung affair as an opportunity to embarrass the President. The ignorances and prejudices of many of our people on the subject of China played into the hands of those Republicans, whose main object was to injure the President and defeat the Treaty. Very few sought to understand the settlement or to ascertain the facts that formed the historic background of it. These facts were clearly set forth by the President himself in a speech delivered at Los Angeles, California, on September 20, 1919. The President said: