For nearly a quarter of a century Corea, the once hermit nation, has been opened to intercourse with the world, and the student has had facilities for understanding the country and people and realizing what are the social and political problems of humanity in the peninsula.

As in most old Asiatic states, so in Corea, there is an almost total absence of an intelligent middle class, which in the West is the characteristic of progressive nations. In the Land of Morning Radiance there is a governing minority consisting of about one-tenth of the whole population. These, the Yangban (civil and military), living in ancient privilege and prerogative and virtually paying no taxes or tolls, prey upon the common people. The great bulk, that is, nine-tenths of the population, is agricultural and is gathered in hamlets and villages.

The typical Corean tills the soil, in which occupation, after ages of unprogressive routine, he has come to his present mental status. There is not even a distinct manufacturing class in Corea, for nearly all industry is still in the cottage. The few articles needed by the laborer for the floor, the wall, and the kitchen are made by the farmer during his winter hours, and his women-folk weave and make up the clothing. The average carpenter, blacksmith, and stone mason is simply a laborer on the land with added skill in a special line. Even the fisherman cultivates the soil. The village schoolmaster is a son of the farmer of the better class. There are groups of population-office-holders and their retainers and hangers-on, shopkeepers and traders, butchers, porters, miners, junk-sailors, and innkeepers, sorcerers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers, but, all told, the number of men who do not live on the soil form but a decimal fraction in the national household.

For these compelling reasons the problems of internal government [444]relate almost wholly to the woe or weal of the tillers of the soil. During the summer of six months the average Corean stands bare-legged in the mud, planting or cultivating grain. His wife and children, especially his daughters, help him in the raising of rice, barley, wheat, and beans, and in the harvesting and securing of the final products. During the four cold months of the year he is at work gathering fuel or making mats, sandals, screens, or thatch. During the first and seventh moons he enjoys an easy time, doing little or nothing, and these two months are like holiday. The average income of a Corean farmer is about thirty dollars a year. The average house in Corea consists only of mud, straw, twine, and wood, above a foundation of earth faced with stone and worth but a few dollars. The price of waste land is from one to five dollars an acre, and of cultivated fertile soil from ten to sixty dollars an acre. The lots are poorly marked and boundary quarrels are incessant. The Corean farmer knows little about scientific irrigation or variety in fertilizers, dried grass being his chief manure. The mountains are greatly denuded of their forests, and alternate droughts and floods work awful disasters. With a naturally good soil and fine climate, agriculture is yet in a backward condition. It is said that the Japanese in the sixteenth century taught the Coreans the cultivation of rice, millions of bushels of which, under stimulus from the same source, they are now able to export annually. In recent years the Japanese have attempted to secure control of the waste lands of Corea so as to develop them, not only for the production of cereals, vegetable wax, paper fibre, and stuff for weaving, but also for cotton to supply the demands of the Osaka mills. Their demands, pressed too severely in July, 1904, were the cause of vigorous native protest in great public meetings.

The Corean rustic is, as a rule, illiterate. Probably only about four out of ten males of the farming class can read either Chinese or Corean, but counting in the women it is estimated that about eighty-five per cent of the people can neither read nor write, though the percentage varies greatly with the locality. As a general thing, there is more acquaintance with books and writing in the southern than in the northern provinces. It is pitiful to find in the Budget for 1904 that but $27,718 are appropriated for schools outside of Seoul, the latter receiving $135,074, of which [445]the sum of $44,220 goes to foreign teachers in the English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese language schools. Although since 1895 the old civil-service examinations have been abolished and there has been a Department of Education, it has thus far had little influence upon the country at large. In the central office in 1904, out of $28,617 appropriated, $19,857 went for salaries and office expenses, $6,500 being for text-book printing.

The Corean farmer is simple in his dress, food, and habits. He does not journey far from home. Although the high-roads are lively with travellers, one sees not the farmer but the literati, the traders, and the porters. Few country folks ever visit the large cities, and in regions near the capital few have seen Seoul. Custom is the eternal law to the rustic, who is patient, bearing extortion until flesh and blood can stand it no longer, when he rises in revolt against his oppressor. Yet it is against the bad man, not the system itself, that he protests. After the obnoxious officer has been recalled or driven away and temporary relief is obtained, the Corean farmer settles down into a good tax-paying subject as of yore, and unless something like the Tong Hak movement stirs him, his wheel of life quickly slips again into the rut of routine. As long as he can get enough to eat he is content. When oppression and robbery are joined to Nature’s niggardliness, he and his comrades are transformed into a howling mob of starving malcontents, ready for bloody vengeance.

The son of the soil is superstitious to the last degree. He lives in constant terror of the demons and spirits that overpopulate earth, air, and water, for he is without the protection that the certainties of science or the strength of pure religion furnishes. No unifying, uplifting, and inspiring knowledge of one God is his. His thatched hut or mud-floored hovel is a museum of fetiches. Often he will give the best fruits of the fields to what seems to an alien a mass of straw or rags. The sorceress thrives like a fat parasite on the farmer, getting well paid for her songs, dances, incantations, and presence at the feasts. Yet the Corean enjoys the religious festivals. He is at least just to himself, while professing generosity to the spirits. He honors the gods but ultimately puts the well-cooked offerings far from them—even into his own interior; for above all things, the worshipper is orthodox in his belief in a well-filled stomach. [446]

With such a people, both Confucianism and Buddhism become the grossest of superstitions. The Corean’s face is toward the past. He invokes and worships the dead, and to him the graveyard contains more than the future can bring him. Besides the extortions of the nobles, officials, and other parasitic or predatory classes, the expense of offerings to his dead ancestors amounts to many millions of dollars a year, far exceeding in their total the national revenue. In Seoul alone there are three thousand sorceresses, each earning at least $7.50 a month. The farmer is poor, but he is hospitable and liberal. He has untold reverence for learning and for rank, he loves flowers and beautiful scenery, but he is stupid in the presence of an innovation. His area of vision is bounded by the hills within the circle of which he was born. His chief recreation is in going to market, for, generally speaking, there are few shops in the peninsula, but there is a market every five or six days, where the natives exchange their products and their opinions. According to the state of weather conditions, the native is happy or suffers, a large harvest making all smile, a scant crop causing famine and hunger and the outbreak of banditti and rapine. Besides buying and selling, huckstering and gossiping, there are at the markets plenty of fighting and drunkenness as diversions. Going out for wool the farmer frequently comes home shorn, but he has had his fun, or rather a variation of deadly monotony. Furthermore, he is fond of a joke and loves to chaff his fellows.

As the country itself is governed out of the graveyard, and sovereign, court, and people are driven by imaginary demons and spirits, so the farmers, both as individuals, as families, and as clans, guard jealously and in fear the ancestral mounds with superstitious reverence. Hence one large element of village excitement is in quarrelling and fighting over graves. About fifty per cent of the cases brought before the country magistrates are said to be connected with these grave fights. These bitter struggles involve whole clans and result in bloodshed and loss of life. Even the dead are not allowed to rest in peace. The digging up of corpses and the tumbling of them beyond the limits in dispute is a common occurrence. This ghoulish activity is varied by an occasional abduction of widows or by other infractions of the law. Another large element of anxiety to the farmer is the protection [447]of the water supply for his rice-swamp. The damming of the stream above or the draining off of the water below may ruin his crop. The breaking of the mud boundaries, and the stealing of water from a neighbor’s field is mirrored in proverbs and folk-lore. It is sufficiently habitual to furnish a plentiful supply of pretexts for quarrels and fighting.

There are four classes of agriculturists. The lowest tiller of the soil is a serf, owning no land, working by the day or contract, and virtually bound to the glebe. The men of the next class, though owning no lands, work the farms of others on shares. These farm-hands and farm-tenants make up the great mass of the Corean people. They live in thatched mud huts, with enough plain food to keep them alive and often fat, but with scanty change of garments and few or no comforts of life. They are occupied during the working months from daybreak to twilight in unremitting toil. The third class consists of the small owners with possessions worth from five hundred to five thousand dollars and numbering three per cent of the farming population. In the fourth or highest class are the landed proprietors, the aristocracy of the land, the richest member being worth as much as four or five million dollars, with an annual income of at least a quarter of a million. Insignificant in numbers, they are mighty in power, for it is these great landowners who rule the realm, and most of them live in Seoul.

To the great mass of the people in Corea there is no motive for much industry beyond danger of starvation, and but little incentive to enterprise. Under old normal conditions now being slowly ameliorated, the official, the yangban, and the landed aristocracy, in a word, the predatory classes, seize upon the common man’s earnings and accumulations, so that it seems to him useless and even foolish to work for more than enough to support life, while as for the “civilization nonsense,” does it not mean more taxation? On the 13th of November, 1902, the announcement was made of the increase in land tax from $10 per measure of ground to $16 per measure. So argues the average man in Corea, the land long ruled by real oppressors and imaginary demons.

The researches of scholars have also revealed the actual economic conditions of the nation in the days of hermitage. Old Corea was not, as in feudal Japan, straitened in its production of food. [448]In the island empire only about one-twelfth of the soil was or could be cultivated. Hence Japan was rigidly limited in her food-producing area, so that the population, besides being kept down through such natural checks as famine, pestilence, storm and flood, was further diminished to fit the food supply by such artificial means as sumptuary laws, licensed prostitution, infanticide, cruel punishments, and frequent decapitation. In Corea, also, where the fertile earth, though formed to be inhabited and abundant in area of plain and valley, was neither properly replenished nor subdued, many checks upon population existed. Local famines were frequent and often long continued, and neither religion nor the means of transportation furnished the means of saving life to any large amount. Artificial checks on too rapid multiplication of humanity operated powerfully. The lesser care and kindness given to female children resulted in a heavy death-rate as compared with that of the boys, the cruel punishments and frequent torture and decapitation and the lack of incentive to industry all wrought together to make both the land and the human life on it of comparatively slight value.

The whole situation was changed when Corea ceased to be a hermit land and began to be fertilized by foreign commerce and ideas. Confronted by new methods of trade, science, and religion, the thinking native was summoned to thought and action. Into the Corean mind, long held in bondage by Confucianism, which degrades woman and narrows man’s intellect, the universal religion entered to compel the Corean man to think of other lands and people besides his own, to search his own heart, to attempt to make himself and his neighbors better, and to take a new outlook on the universe. The new doctrines delivered believers from the paralyzing thrall of demons and evil spirits, from ancestor worship, and from the sceptre held by the hand rising out of the grave. Into the Corea clamped as in iron bands by false economic notions entered the spirit of free competition. Into a land that knew no such thing as a foreign market the railway brings an eager purchaser to the farmer’s door, and by carrying his goods to the seaports it enables him to give to and receive manifold benefits from the world at large.

Already, through the energy of the canny islanders from the east, the crops in Corea have quadrupled, though under native [449]mismanagement this does not necessarily mean immediate benefit to the man on the soil, but rather to the official class, or to the landholder in the capital. It has been computed that the production of sixty million bushels of grain have thus been developed in Corea through the Japanese demand. Between the feverish enterprise of the Japanese on the one side and the tireless thrift of the Chinese on the other, “the good old days” of primitive routine are gone forever. Corea has 4,500,000 acres under cultivation, or about eight and a half per cent of her 82,000 square miles of area, so that 3,500,000 available acres await the plough. From her arable soil six millions more of population might easily find subsistence, and nearly ten millions of dollars of crops could be raised. The peninsula needs in every great valley the railway, which “quadruples the value of every foot of land within twenty miles of its line.” The line from Fusan to Seoul has already raised the value of town property in elect places hundreds of per cent and measurably all along between the terminals. This railway was begun in August, 1901, but though the work slackened for lack of capital, by December 1, 1903, thirty-one miles at either end had been built. The outbreak of the war with Russia revealed its military value and promise was at once given that by Japanese Government aid it would be completed with its thirty-one tunnels and 20,500 feet of bridges by the end of 1904. This Fusan-Seoul railway, 287 miles long, will traverse four provinces in the richest part of Corea, wherein are seven-tenths of all the houses and five-sevenths of all the cultivated area in the empire. Here also are the sites of the great fairs held six times monthly, the thirty-nine stations of the road being located at or near these places of trade, the total business of which amounts to over sixty-five per cent of the internal trade of the empire.

The Corean social and political system, sufficiently weak in hermit days, has shown itself unable to withstand the repeated shock of attack by eager and covetous foreigners, nor will it ever be able, even in a measure, to defend itself against the fierce and unrelenting greed of the strong nations intrenched upon its soil, except by complete reorganization. Both the outward forms and the inward spirit must change if the Coreans are to preserve their national identity. The nation has been the bone of contention between jealous and greedy rivals. One foreign government by [450]crafty diplomacy secures the right of cutting timber valued at millions of dollars, another gets mining concessions, others propose this or that industry or supposed line of production which depleted the treasury. The impoverished kingdom has not only wasted many millions of treasure in foolish enterprises, but is deprived of its natural assets in timber, metals, fisheries, and industries.

The problem of bringing Corea into harmony with her modern environment is only in some features like that of Japan, for there have been wanting in the peninsula what was so effective in Japan’s case. In the island empire, the long previous preparation by means of the infiltration of Western ideas during two centuries of communication with Europe through the Dutch merchants, the researches of her own scholars furnishing inspiration from their national history, the exercise during many generations of true patriotism and self-sacrifice for the public good prepared the island nation to cope with new conditions and situations. In the clash with the West, Japan came out victor. Corea has no samurai. She lacks what Japan has always had—a cultured body of men, superbly trained in both mind and body, the soldier and scholar in one, who held to a high ideal of loyalty, patriotism, and sacrifice for country. The island samurai enjoying the same prerogative and privilege as the Corean yangban (civil and military) not only abolished feudalism, but after giving up their hereditary pensions and privileges, joined the productive classes, while at the same time the Japanese merchants and mechanics were raised in the social scale, the pariahs given citizenship, and then all lines of promotion opened to all in the army, navy, schools, courts, and civil service. The fertilizing streams of foreign commerce, the inspiration that comes from brotherhood with other nations, and above all, the power brought to Nippon through the noble labors and object lessons of the Christian missionaries, enabled the Japanese to take equal place in the world with the nations of the West. Corea, on the contrary, by still allowing the existence of predatory classes—nobles, officials, and great landowners—by denying her people education, by being given to superstition from palace to hut and from sovereign to serf, remains still in weakness and poverty. What Corea above all needs, is that the lazy yangban cut their long finger-nails and get to work.

Yet dark as is the situation, it is not without hope. Slowly [451]and painfully the Coreans are learning that no nation is born in a day. Under the training of Christian teachers, a generation with new motives to action and new mental horizons, and fed with food to sustain the spirit, is coming on. Christianity is, with a remnant at least, making headway against the vices so common to this mild-mannered nation—skill in lying, stealing, gambling, drunkenness, and the social evil.

For ages and until Japan humbled China in 1894, Corea was so thoroughly and in all things the vassal and pupil of the Middle Kingdom, from which most of the elements of her civilization had been borrowed, that in the tributary kingdom there could be no patriotism in its highest sense, nor could political parties and cliques have any reason for existence except as they were concerned with aims that ended in selfishness. With the people in general, there was only anxiety to pay taxes, win the favor of the local magistrate, and escape the clutches of the law. With masters and rulers, there was ever pitiful fear of the great country China, and, under Confucianism, a desire to keep things as they were, mixed with impotent dread of change. Of pure love of country, of willingness to make sacrifices for their native land—that is almost a new thought as yet nourished by a few far-seeing patriots. In the evolution of the Corean, social and psychic, his present ethical stage is not beyond that of the group, clan, or neighborhood. It has not yet reached the individual. The majority of the people have that kind of patriotism which means the instinctive desire to preserve national identity. The one thing which they now fear, being in the vortex of the great storm of war and in the centre of the economic typhoon of the twentieth century, is national extinction. Even to-day the Coreans feel that they would rather live without the new things of civilization, such as railways, education, public hygiene, or even of righteous government, than be subject to an alien Power. History to the peninsular gives no uncertain sound as to what foreign intervention has always meant, that is, more oppression and even rapine. Seeing what has happened in half a lifetime, through the coming of the alien to Corea, the native does not want civilization at the hands of foreigners, though it may be that he will have to take it. Possibly through education and a new outlook upon the universe he will be glad to get it, even struggling for it until by assimilation [452]it becomes his own. In ancient history and the old days of the separation of nations, there were many civilizations and varying standards. In these latter days of the world’s brotherhood there is but one standard of civilization, and but one body of international law, which all must obey. The nation or kingdom that will not serve and obey this standard will pass out of history and perish. The signs that Corea realizes this truth and that her best men are seeking fraternity with their fellows for help and uplift are not wanting. Naturally they turn to the great republic, which since its beginning has steadfastly followed the policy of healing, helping, teaching, and uplifting the Asiatic nations.

Corea sent a delegate to the International Postal Union, which met in Washington, and in 1896 a postal system with stamps of four kinds was established, and under French auspices has been working in excellent condition. The stamps, as well as the national flag and documents, coins and other expressions of what is essentially representative of the Coreans as a nation, illustrate their repertoire of symbolism. The flag in blue, red, black, and white contains the two great emblems of the primitive Chinese philosophy and theory of the universe. Through these, the Corean sees all things visible and invisible produced as the results of their endless working and counteraction in combination and dissolution. The forces of heaven and earth, light and darkness, the positive and the negative, the male and the female, the in and the yo, are represented as two germs or commas in constant embrace or movement. This figure occupies the centre of the field and in each corner are the broken lines of the Pal Kwai, or eight diagrams of primitive Chinese tradition concerning the origin of language and writing. On the stamps we read the Chinese characters Tai han and Corea. Like China, old Japan, Russia, Turkey and other church nations, which unite more or less closely Church and State and are governed, in spite of all outward development and manifestations, by primitive or mediæval notions, Corea is a “Tei Koku,” or “divinely governed” realm, and so makes profession in Chinese characters, as does even modern Japan, though furnished with a Constitution and Diet. Besides these Chinese ideographs, we read in English, “Imperial Corean Post,” and in the en-mun or native script, a sentence to the same effect. The national flower is the plum blossom, and is figured with its leaves on either side of the [453]stem. The value or denomination of the stamp is given below both in English with Roman letters, and in Corean or en-mun. The date-mark made by the ink-stamp shows in the French spelling of the name of the country and capital the international character of the postal system. The national colors, as judged by the hangings in the royal palace, are yellow, red, and green.

Imitating other things imperial in adjoining or Western nations, the Government at Seoul established a Bureau of Decorations. These baubles, being liberally distributed, have helped handsomely to deplete the treasury of the little empire, most of whose people live in a state of semi-starvation or righteous discontent. The Emperor himself and his generals and ministers have had their breasts liberally adorned with various marks of the regard of the rulers of Japan, Great Britain, Russia, France, and Belgium, while between August 5, 1900, and December 20, 1902, the Corean Government had bestowed forty-two decorations, requiring a liberal outlay of bullion and artistic workmanship. To the Emperor of Japan, Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, the Kaiser of the German Empire, the President of the French Republic, the King of Italy, the King of the Belgians, the Emperor of Austria, and the Crown Prince of Japan, the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure was awarded. This contains the emblem in the centre of the flag. No Americans have been thus officially adorned, but the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure was offered to President McKinley, only to be declined; he having, happily for the American people, nothing to offer in return. The Great Decoration of the Plum Blossom has been given to Prince Kwacho of Japan and the Russian Prince Cyril, while the other decorations, containing the Pal Kwai of the eight mystic diagrams and the plum blossom or the national flower, in several grades or classes, have been offered to various servants or guests of the Government. Along with this brilliancy on foreign coat breasts, it is suggestive to read in the imperial budget for 1904 that of $19,560 appropriated to the bureau of decorations, the amount expended on bullion, medals, etc., was $7,431, and for salaries $10,130. Another interesting item, illuminating economic methods in Seoul, is that of $10,453 appropriated for the Mining Bureau. Of this amount the sum of $8,173 was spent for salaries and travelling, all the rest, except one item marked “miscellaneous $744,” being for office [454]expenses. In the Ceremonial Bureau $19,000 were used on salaries and office expenses out of a total of $21,508. Similar titbits of economic information are frequent under the heads of the Board of Generals (who supervise an army supposed to be five thousand strong) and that of Imperial Sacrifices, and others, explain very clearly the condition of a country in which there is no clear line of demarcation between the palace and the Government or administration, while eloquent in suggestions as to the reason why the larger part of Corea remains in a state of more or less chronic insurrection.

The budget for 1904 shows a total revenue of $14,214,573 made up of the following items: land tax, $9,703,591; house tax, $460,295; taxes on salt, fish, etc., $210,000; poll tax, $850,000; miscellaneous taxes, $200,000; arrears from 1903, $2,790,687.

The items of disbursement are as follows: Imperial privy purse, $1,013,359; imperial sacrifices, $186,641; household department, $327,541; war department, $5,180,614; finance department, $42,741,999; communications, $637,648; incidentals and extras, $1,843,503. Other items, of which the police bureau, $406,925, and the foreign department, $287,367, and educational, $205,673, are the more important, are pension bureau, board of generals, the cabinet government records, bureau of decorations, law department, department of agriculture, privy council, and special palace guard. It is pleasant to note that there is a surplus of $275, but the amount given for education and expended under the head of agriculture seems pitiful. The large items of the budget deal almost wholly with the salaries of native officials. One interesting and redeeming item among the “extras” is that “for helping shipwrecked men, $5,000.”

The greatest immediate need of Corea is a uniform and stable currency. Added to ancient evils was the action of Japan in adopting the gold standard in 1899, which threw all things commercial in Corea into dire confusion. On the 15th of December, 1901, the coinage law was published, by which Corea adopted the gold standard; but this law was never put into effect. The Japanese have frequently endeavored by various means to secure a standard currency.

Under the stimulus and pressure of foreign trade, Corea has now at least nine ports open to the residence and business of foreigners [455]besides the three or four inland places of traffic. Wonsan (Gensan), Fusan, and Chemulpo were opened by the treaties of 1876 and 1882, and have thriving settlements. The ginseng crop exported from these places is usually bought by Japanese, whose usual practice is that, for example, of May, 1902, when of the fifty thousand catties, ten thousand catties were burnt at Chemulpo, in order to keep up the price. On the 1st of October, 1898, Chinnampo and Mokpo were added to the list of open ports. The former lies on the northern shore of Ping-an inlet, twenty miles from the sea and forty miles from Ping-an city. It is now a thriving town with well laid-out streets. As the river leading to Ping-an is for ten miles or so below the city not navigable even by very small sea-going steamers, it can never be “a port” in the ordinary sense, but the returns of its trade are tabulated with those of Chinnampo, its outlet. Wiju (Ai-chiu) and Anju are almost the only other ports of value in the province of Ping-an. Anju is the landing stage of the American Mining Company for its mining materials and explosives.

Yongampo is in north latitude 38° 52′ and east longitude 126° 04′. When it was opened in 1898, Russians and Japanese took up land so eagerly that a collision seemed imminent. Later it came very near being made a Russian fortress as “Port Nicholas.” Mokpo, in the southwestern part of Chullado, is the natural maritime outlet of “the Garden of Corea.” Soon after it was made port of entry and trade, the wisdom shown in its selection was justified, for its growth has been healthy and rapid. From this point, in the autumn of 1902, a Boston gentleman went into the interior for a hunting trip of two months, during which time he killed three large tigers, besides deer and wild boar.

On May 1, 1899, Kunsan, Masampo, and Songchin were thrown open to foreign trade and residence. Kunsan is on the west coast, and like Mokpo, long famous for its abundant export of rice paid as revenue. It lies at the mouth of the river dividing the two rich and warm provinces of Chulla and Chung Chong, about half-way between Chemulpo and Mokpo, whence the rice, wheat, beans, hides, grasscloth, paper, manufactured articles in bamboo, fans, screens, mats, and marine products of many kinds are exported. Masampo, a few miles to the southwest of Fusan, in north latitude 35° 09′ and east longitude 128° 40′, has one of the finest harbors [456]in the world, which, when well fortified, might command the entrance to the Sea of Japan. In the negotiations between Japan and Russia, in 1903, this spot was jealously coveted by both Powers as the prize of the future, as the party possessing it might make it a Dardanelles, closing the sea between the island empire and the continent and making this body of water a Euxine. Russia tried to bind Japan not to fortify this or any other place on the east coast of Corea. Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and Coreans soon flocked to this favored port and have made business lively. Songchin, once the seat of an old stronghold, in the large northeastern province of Ham Kiung, bordering on Russia, which has no long navigable rivers, as in the south, lies about 120 miles from Wonsan and sends most of its products thither. It has a poor harbor in a foggy region, but fertile soil, fat cattle, and mineral riches are within reach. The Customs Reports for 1903 show a growing trade of $328,891. Eleven other landing stages bring up the total value of trade in Ham Kiung province to $1,676,714. In 1902 the total imports were nearly balanced by the exports from all Corea. Cotton is becoming an important item of sale abroad. Gold in 1902 was exported to the amount of $2,532,053. The total value of foreign trade has doubled during the past decade. So far the steamer tonnage is, like the general foreign trade, over three-fourths Japanese. Most emphatically and luminously does the modern economic as well as political history of the peninsula prove that the best interests of Japan and Corea are closely interwoven. Mutual benefit follows unity and friendship, reciprocal injury results from estrangement.

All these open ports are the gateways of a commerce that must steadily and healthfully increase, and which under stable and just government would rapidly enlarge. So long as there is uncertainty as to the political status of the Land of Morning Calm, the chief importance of the maritime gateways into the country will be strategic and military, rather than commercial. A permanent settlement of the political question, in debate ever since the modern renascence of Japan, ought to act on the development of the natural resources of Corea as the warm spring rains act upon soil long chilled and fallow under winter’s frost. Few regions, whether we consider its geographical location for commerce, the fertility of its soil, its animal wealth, the richness of its mineral deposits, or [457]the abundance of its treasures in the sea, are more highly favored than Corea. When man, society, and government in the peninsula answer Nature’s challenge and match the opportunity, the world will find that history’s storehouse of surprises has not been empty. Toward the development of the kind of man needed, the Christian missionaries are, above all other teachers and forces, working, and with every sign of promise. [458]