XIX
WHAT CAN WE DO?
"What do you want us to do?" men ask me. "Do you seriously suggest that
America or Great Britain should risk a breach of good relations or even a
war with Japan to help Korea? If not, what is the use of saying anything?
You only make the Japanese harden their hearts still more."
What can we do? Everything!
I appeal first to the Christian Churches of the United States, Canada and Britain. I have seen what your representatives, more particularly the agents of the American and Canadian Churches, have accomplished in Korea itself. They have built wisely and well, and have launched the most hopeful and flourishing Christian movement in Asia. Their converts have established congregations that are themselves missionary churches, sending out and supporting their own teachers and preachers to China. A great light has been lit in Asia. Shall it be extinguished? For, make no mistake, the work is threatened with destruction. Many of the church buildings have been burned; many of the native leaders have been tortured and imprisoned; many of their followers, men, women and children, have been flogged, or clubbed, or shot.
You, the Christians of the United States and of Canada, are largely responsible for these people. The teachers you sent and supported taught them the faith that led them to hunger for freedom. They taught them the dignity of their bodies and awakened their minds. They brought them a Book whose commands made them object to worship the picture of Emperor—even of Japanese Emperor—made them righteously angry when they were ordered to put part of their Christian homes apart for the diseased outcasts of the Yoshiwara to conduct their foul business, made them resent having the trade of the opium seller or the morphia agent introduced among them.
Your teaching has brought them floggings, tortures unspeakable, death. I do not mourn for them, for they have found something to which the blows of the lashed twin bamboos and the sizzling of the hot iron as it sears their flesh are small indeed. But I would mourn for you, if you were willing to leave them unhelped, to shut your ears to their calls, to deny them your practical sympathy.
What can we do? you ask. You can exercise the powers that democratic government has given you to translate your indignation into action. You can hold public meetings, towns meetings and church meetings, and declare, formally and with all the weight of your communities behind you, where you stand in this matter. You can make your sentiments known to your own Government and to the Imperial Japanese Government.
Then you can extend practical support to the victims of this outbreak of cruelty. There could be no more effective rebuke than for the Churches of the English-speaking nations to say to their fellow Christians of Korea, "We are standing by you. We cannot share your bodily sufferings, but we will try to show our sympathy in other ways. We will rebuild some of your churches that have been burned down; we will support the widows or orphans of Christians who have been unjustly slain, or will help to support the families of those now imprisoned for their faith and for freedom. We will show, by deeds, not words, that Christian brotherhood is a reality and not a sham."
In doing so, you will supply an example that will not be forgotten so long as Asia endures. Men say—and say rightly—that Korea is the key-land of Northeastern Asia, so far as domination of that part of the lands of the Pacific is concerned. Korea is still more the key-land of Asia for Western civilization and Christian ideals. Let Christianity be throttled here, and it will have received a set-back in Asia from which it will take generations to recover.
"The Koreans are a degenerate people, not fit for self-government," says the man whose mind has been poisoned by subtle Japanese propaganda. Korea has only been a very few years in contact with Western civilization, but it has already indicated that this charge is a lie. Its old Government was corrupt, and deserved to fall. But its people, wherever they have had a chance, have demonstrated their capacity. In Manchuria hundreds of thousands of them, mostly fled from Japanese oppression, are industrious and prosperous farmers. In the Hawaiian Islands, there are five thousand Koreans, mainly labourers, and their families, working on the sugar plantations. They have built twenty-eight schools for their children, and raise among themselves $20 a head a year for the education of their children; they have sixteen churches; they bought $80,000 worth of Liberty bonds during the war, and subscribed liberally to the Red Cross. Some of these Hawaiian Koreans—210 in all—volunteered to serve in the war. A large number of Manchurian Koreans—their total has been placed as high as thirty thousand—joined the Russian forces, fought under General Lin, and later, in conjunction with the Czecho-Slovak prisoners, fought the rearmed German prisoners and the Bolsheviks.
In America the Koreans who were fortunate enough to escape have brought the culture of rice into California, and are a prosperous community there. Young Koreans have won prominent place in American colleges and in American business. One big business in Philadelphia was created and is conducted by a Korean. Give these people a chance, and they soon show what they can do.
A word with the statesmen.
Japan is a young country, so far as Western civilization is concerned. She is the youngest of the Great Powers. She desires the good will of the world, and is willing to do much to win it. Be frank with her. You owe it to her to deal faithfully with her.
When you ask me if I would risk a war over Korea, I answer this: Firm action to-day might provoke conflict, but the risk is very small. Act weakly now, however, and you make a great war in the Far East almost certain within a generation. The main burden of the Western nations in such a war will be borne by America.
To the Japanese themselves, I venture to repeat words that I wrote over eleven years ago. They are even more true now than when they were written:
"The future of Japan, the future of the East, and, to some extent, the future of the world, lies in the answer to the question whether the militarists or the party of peaceful expansion gain the upper hand in the immediate future (in Japan). If the one, then we shall have harsher rule in Korea, steadily increasing aggression in Manchuria, growing interference with China, and, in the end, a titanic conflict, the end of which none can see. Under the other, Japan will enter into an inheritance, wider, more glorious and more assured than any Asiatic Power has attained for many centuries…. Japan has it in her to be, not the Mistress of the East, reigning, sword in hand, over subject races—for that she can never permanently be—but the bringer of peace to, and the teacher of, the East. Will she choose the nobler end?"
End of Project Gutenberg's Korea's Fight for Freedom, by F.A. McKenzie