In Korea with Marquis Ito

by George Trumbull Ladd

What shall be said, however, as to the part which the Korean Government and the Korean people themselves are likely to contribute toward solving the difficult and intricate problem of the future relations of the two nations? The basis for a plausible answer to this question must be found in an estimate of the material resources of Korea and in a calculation as to the share which the Koreans are destined to have in the improved conditions brought about by the development of these resources. It has already been shown that the soil of the peninsula, under improved methods of cultivation, can easily be made to support double the existing population. Reforestation and proper treatment of the forests remaining can easily supply this increased population with fuel and with timber. The introduction of new crops, and the increase of the products of cotton and silk, the fostering of such forms of manufacture as are fitted to the country, and the development of the mines, can just as easily be made to place this two-folded population in circumstances of greatly increased comfort and prosperity. And with it all will go, of course, the building up of foreign trade and the securing of all the benefits that follow in its train. But who will actually possess the fruits of this development; will it be the Koreans themselves, or the Japanese immigrants?

So far as the answer to this question depends upon the enactment and the enforcement of a just legal code—the right to an equal chance, and security of this right if only the man is able to seize and improve it—the Japanese Residency-General is solemnly pledged and actually committed. But laws, courts, educational institutions, and banking facilities cannot do everything. After all these, and in the midst of all these, there is the man—his physical and mental characteristics, his moral and spiritual impulses. Overwhelming Japanese immigration is perhaps, then, greatly to be dreaded by the Koreans, even when the former can no longer take from the latter by fraud or by violence. The dread, however, that the Koreans will be supplanted by the Japanese would seem by no means to be wholly warranted in view of existing facts. The actual native population of the Korean peninsula is difficult to ascertain; but the latest census, taken in the spring of 1907, shows that it was probably greatly overestimated by the previous statistics. This census gave the numbers as 9,638,578 people inhabiting 2,322,457 houses. A census of the Japanese population in Korea, January 31, 1907, returned the figures of 81,657 in all, of which 31,754 were females. As compared with the returns for March 31, 1906, this census showed an increase of about 20,000 in the non-official Japanese population (a calculation not differing greatly from that based upon the returns of the steamship agency at Fusan, see [p. 143 f.]). Making allowance for those immigrants who failed to register, we may calculate that not far from 100,000 Japanese, exclusive of the army and the civil officials, were resident in Korea during the summer of 1907. The great majority of these immigrants were traders, artisans, and common laborers; but an increasing number of Japanese farmers were settling, especially in the fertile valleys of Kyung-sang-do and Cholla-do. Of these traders, artisans, and common laborers, many are engaged in building Japanese houses and in construction work on the Japanese railways; by no means all such immigrants are likely to become permanent residents in Korea. With the farmers the case is not the same.

Is the annual rate of Japanese immigration into Korea likely to increase greatly in the future? No one can tell positively; but the negative answer seems much the more likely. The day of temptation to the mere adventurer is largely gone by; the Koreans themselves are likely to become acquainted with the way of doing things as the Japanese demand requires they should be done, and then many of these foreign traders, artisans, and laborers will have their places taken by Koreans. Formosa, Manchuria, and Hokkaido are rivals of Korea for the Japanese agriculturists and other kinds of permanent settlers; South America and other countries offer greater inducements to the emigration companies. Moreover, at about the same time that the results of these censuses were published, a local paper in Seoul published the birth and death statistics of the Japanese colony there. These statistics showed that during the previous year there had been an excess of deaths over births among the Japanese in Seoul. Of births there were 312—187 male and 125 female, while the deaths amounted to a total of 464—308 male and 156 female. And yet there are few old people, and almost none who came as invalids, in this foreign population.

Let it be supposed, however, that the annual net increase of Japanese population in Korea amounts to 20,000 for the next fifty years. There will then be only somewhat more than one million of this now foreign population. But meantime the Korean peninsula will have become quite capable of supporting double its present native population. Besides this, there are those—to the opinion of whom the present writer is strongly inclined—who feel confident that fifty years from now the distinction between Korean and Japanese, among the common people, will be very nearly, if not quite completely, wiped out. And, indeed, the two nations are of essentially the same derivation, so far as their dominant strains of ancestral blood are concerned; and great as are the present differences between the Japanese in Japan and the Koreans in Korea, there is no real reason why both Japanese and Koreans should not become essentially one people in Korea.

There is then, it would seem, no essential and permanent reason of a material sort why Korea should not remain Korean in its principal features, if the next half-century shows the expected results in its material development. We have seen that the present Residency-General is committed to the policy of developing the land in the behalf of its own inhabitants, while according all just and natural rights, and all reasonable encouragement, to foreign immigration and to foreign capital. Again, however, the same decisive but as yet unanswered questions return: Can the Court be purified? Can an honest and efficient Korean official class be secured, trained, and supported by the nation? Can that middle class—which is in all modern nations the source of the controlling economic and moral factors—be constituted out of the body of the Korean people? And, finally, can the great multitude, the Korean populace, be made more intelligent, law-abiding, and morally sound?

As to the purification of the Court at Seoul under the ex-Emperor, and so far as his influence could be extended—such a thing was found impossible by the Resident-General. Warnings, advice, experience of evil results—all were of no avail. This weak and corrupt nature would not free itself from its environment of sorceresses, eunuchs, soothsayers, and selfish or desperate, corrupt, and low-lived native and foreign advisers; and without the conversion of the Emperor, under the former conditions, the Court could not be made more intelligent, honest and patriotic. So long and so far as the ex-Emperor can exercise his parental influence upon the present Emperor in national affairs, the part which the Court plays in the redemption of the nation will be comparatively small. But this influence is now broken; and the measures which are being taken wholly to nullify it can scarcely fail to succeed. If it becomes necessary, His ex-Majesty can be given a residence remote from Seoul. The Convention of July, 1907, gives to the Japanese Resident-General a hitherto impossible control over the entourage of the Emperor. It is therefore altogether unlikely that any future ruler of Korea, even if he should wish to follow this bad example, this most disastrous precedent, will be able to rival for mischief his predecessors, by way of encouraging fraud, violence, and sedition at home, and foreign misunderstandings and interferences through the help of unwise or unscrupulous “foreign friends.” Moreover, the present Emperor, so far as can be judged by the brief experience under his rule, is either not disposed, or not able, to continue the evil practices of his Imperial ancestor. The proposals for reform brought before His Korean Majesty seem now to meet with neither open nor secret opposition. Best of all, the palace horde of evil men and women is being reduced from within, and excluded from without; and this, in the absence of complaints and petitions for pity, sent over the civilized world, from the royal “prisoner” under a blood-thirsty Japanese guard! Thus there is solid ground on which to build hopes of a far less corrupt, a much more intelligent and honest, Korean Court.

That honorable and brave leaders—generals, civil rulers, magistrates, and judges—can come out of Korean ancestry, there is the evidence of history to show. True, the number of such leaders, through all the past centuries of Korea’s sad and disgraceful career, has been relatively small. But, as has been repeatedly pointed out, this fact has been largely due to the corrupt official system, and the ever-present corrupting influence, which has come from across the Yellow Sea—that is, from China. The Cabinet officials who had to meet the severely trying emergency which ended with the abdication of the Emperor, a new Convention with Japan, and the pacification of a people much given over to local disorders and to the spreading of the spirit of riot and sedition, on the whole acquitted themselves well. It is, indeed, difficult to see how they could have done better for the country under the existing circumstances. That timber can be grown in Korea, out of which may be hewn in the future enough material for a sound and fair official edifice, there is, we think, no good reason to doubt. Under the recent Convention the responsibility for framing laws, policing the country, securing order, appointing a just and intelligent magistracy, as well as developing schools and industries and arts, rests primarily upon the Japanese Government. If moderation and wisdom can be secured here, a sufficient force of native official helpers and partners in all the benevolent projects of the Marquis Ito can probably in due time also be secured. In order, however, that Japanese and Korean officials should co-operate heartily, and should live and work together in peace, it is necessary that the underlying principle of their co-operation should be not selfish, but controlled by devotion to duty and by an intelligent and sincere desire to secure the welfare of both nations. Only such high motives can unite men of different nationalities, or even of the same nation, in works of economic reform and moral improvement. This is only to say that in Korea, as everywhere else in the ancient and the modern world alike, the real and lasting success of the government must depend upon its intelligence and its righteousness. It is to be hoped that the capacity for both these essential classes of qualifications for self-government is in the Korean blood, if only it can have tuition, example, and freedom for development.

With the improvement of the economic and industrial conditions in Korea, and especially with the enlarged opportunities for foreign commerce, a fairly intelligent and well-to-do middle class population is likely to result from the Japanese Protectorate. This class is in a process of evolution in Japan itself. It is essentially the product, “natural”—so to say—where public schools exist and thrive, and where the conditions are favorable to manufacture, trade, and agriculture on any large scale. But especially is such a class one of the most sure and valuable results of a more highly moral and spiritual religion. Christianity distinctly favors, when it becomes practically operative, the formation of a middle class. In Korea hitherto there have been only, as a rule, corrupt and oppressive rulers and officials, and ignorant, oppressed, and degraded multitudes. The foundation of schools of the modern type, especially for technical and manual training, and the spread of Christianity, will, almost inevitably, combine to raise a body of thrifty, fairly intelligent, and upright, self-respecting citizens. This will go far toward solving the problem of the reform and redemption of Korea.

As to the destiny of considerable numbers of the lower orders of the people, that is perhaps unavoidably true which has been said of the Korean farmers: “A large percentage of them are past all hope of salvation.” The professional robbers and beggars, the riotous “pedlers,” the seditious among the disbanded troops or the “tiger hunters,” the wild and savage inhabitants of the mountainous regions, the people who live by thieving, counterfeiting, soothsaying, divining, and other illicit ways, will have to submit, reform, or be exterminated. Doubtless, many of them will prefer to be exterminated. But our examination of the previous chapters encourages and confirms the hope that something much better than this is possible for the great multitude of the peasants among the Korean people. Marquis Ito has set his heart on helping this class toward a much improved condition. The promise of this he has distinctly affirmed in both private and public addresses, and has indeed done all that he possibly could to confirm. It is this also upon which every true-hearted missionary is most intently bent. For it was to these same multitudes—sheep without a shepherd—that Jesus came; on their uplift and salvation he set his heart. It would be contrary to the experience of the centuries to suppose that an enlightened form of education and a spiritual religion could combine in the effort to raise the multitudes of any nation, without resulting in a large measure of success.

It would seem, then, that the responsibility for a successful and relatively permanent solution of the difficult problem offered by the geographical, historical and other important relations of Japan and Korea, under the now existing Convention between the two governments, rests most heavily upon the Japanese themselves. They have at last “a free hand”; the material with which they have to deal in order to construct a new and improved national structure is, indeed, in bad and largely unsound condition; but it is not hopeless, and it is not radically deficient in the qualities necessary for a sound and durable structure. Korea is, inherently considered, capable of reform; but at present it is not capable of self-government, much less of self-instituted and wholly self-controlled reform. Japan has taken upon herself the task of furnishing example, stimulus, guidance, and effective forces, to set this desirable ideal into reality. No other nation has this task; no other nation is going seriously to interfere with Japan in its task. On the Japanese Government and the Japanese people rests the heavy responsibility of securing a new and greatly improved national life for the millions of the Korean peninsula; if they succeed, to them will chiefly be the praise and the profit; if they fail, to them will chiefly be the shame and the loss. At present, and in the near future, it is the last of these three sets of determining factors—namely, the policy and practice of Japan herself with reference to Korea—which will have the final word to say in the solution of this difficult problem. The judgment of the civilized world is already pronounced upon this matter. Korea has already been judged impotent and unworthy to be trusted with the management either of her own internal affairs or of her relations to other nations in the Far East and in the world at large. Japan has been judged to be most favorably situated and, for the protection of her own interests, best entitled to undertake and to carry through the reform and reconstitution of Korea. Japan also will in the future be judged, by the judgment of the civilized world and by the verdict of history, according to the way in which she fulfils her duties, and accomplishes her task, in Korea.