without. By cheating and chicanery, they relieved the Imperial treasury of its funds, and in their eagerness to fill their pockets never stopped to think of what dangerous seeds of disorder and rapine they were scattering broadcast over the benighted peninsula."
It must doubtless be confessed that under the ex-Emperor the efforts of the Residency-General to effect the needed reforms were successful only to a limited extent. But with his last piece of intriguing to "relieve the Imperial treasury of its funds, "by sending a commission to the Hague Conference," in co-operation with native and foreign schemers," the old era came quickly to an end. The history of its termination will be told elsewhere; but the fact has illumined and strengthened the hope that Korea, too, can in time produce men fit to rule with some semblance of honesty, fidelity, and righteousness. Meantime, they must be largely ruled from without.
How this hope of industrial and political redemption may be extended to the people at large and applied to the different important interests of the nation, both in its internal and foreign relations, will be illustrated in the several following chapters. Now that the Emperor[1] is publicly committed to an extended policy of reform; that the Ministers are for the first time in the history of Korea really a Cabinet exercising some control; that the Resident-General has the right and the duty to guide and to enforce all the important
- ↑ During all my visit in Korea it was commonly reported by those intimate at Court that the Crown Prince was an imbecile both in body and in mind. But in his boyhood he was rather more than ordinarily bright, and his mother, the murdered Queen, was the most clever and brilliant Korean woman of her time. It is not strange, then, that since his accession to the throne and in view of his obviously sensible way of yielding to good advice from others, in spite of the evil influence of his father, the impression has been made that he might have been feigning imbecility in order to escape plots to assassinate him, which were formed in the interests of a rival claimant to the throne.
