of debt to Japan, but the Adviser refused to allow it. The money must be borrowed from Japan at the higher rate. A few million dollars' worth of nickels were made in Japan, where the Japanese enjoyed the profit, which amounted to over fifty per cent, and the nickels were sent to Korea. The Adviser announced that on the ist of June, or about then, everybody who brought nickels would receive the new ones at par with the Japanese money, but would receive one new one for two of the old. As the old nickels were at a discount of 240, this would mean that anyone with capital could buy up old nickels at 240, and exchange them at 200. Chinese and Japanese merchants leaped to do so, and the market was sucked dry of money. When the day of exchanging came, it was found that the supply of new nickels was entirely inadequate. So the exchange was put off for two months ; then for two months more. Meanwhile the Korean merchants were going to the wall because they could not meet their notes, owing to the tightness of the money market. Some of them were trying to save themselves by borrowing from Japanese usurers at six per cent a month. At this most painful juncture the Emperor proposed to lend some three hundred thousand dollars of his private funds to his suffering merchants; but when he sent his cheque to the Japanese bank, where his funds were deposited, the Japanese Adviser ordered payment stopped, and would not let him draw out his private funds even to help the merchants in their desperate straits. There is no language too strong in which to denounce this outrage.
In the northern city of Pyeng-yang the Japanese carried on enormous confiscations of land. They even enclosed with their stakes property belonging to American citizens, and when the owners complained to the Japanese Consul they were told that it would be all right, but that they had better not remove the stakes at present. Nor did the Americans dare to do so; for though they themselves would have been safe, their servants would have been seized by Japanese and cruelly beaten. A Korean in that town was ordered by a private Japanese to sell
