entirely useless army receives one million dollars. In Seoul a dozen or more primary schools have been established, with an average attendance of about fifty boys. These are of rather inferior grade, but they are much better than nothing. Arithmetic, geography and history are taught, besides the Chinese character and the Japanese vernacular. There is a small normal school, but it is in native hands only and its product is of little or no account. The so-called Middle School, which is housed in a substantial foreign building, can accommodate three hundred students, but the actual number is only about sixty. Two foreigners, American and Japanese, together with six Koreans, form the faculty of this school. Besides the higher Korean branches, chemistry, physics, botany, physiology, general history, geography, arithmetic, algebra and geometry are taught. The difficulty in this, as in all the other schools, is that the government gives no encouragement to the graduates. The student expects, and has a right to expect, that after graduating from a government school he should have a better chance to receive official position than ordinary, uneducated Koreans. But he finds that nepotism still holds sway, and that personal and family influence is a better door to preferment than education. These Korean youth have not yet come to recognise education as its own reward, and so the schools are almost empty.
Many of the Koreans are excellent students, especially in mathematics. They are quick to catch the point, and in every respect they compare favourably with boys of the same age in Western countries. There is no doubt whatever that they are the intellectual equals of the Japanese. They have lacked only the opportunity and the incentive.
There are a number of important foreign language schools in Seoul, - English, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. These are successfully carried on by gentlemen of these various nationalities. The government also employs a German musician to train a native band according to Western methods, and so successful has he been that foreigners hardly know which to
