The Regulations for the Financial Department provide for the creation of a Temporary Bureau for investigation of the national resources, with a staff consisting of a Director, a secretary, 3 commissioners, and 5 technical experts.
More detailed regulations for the different offices under these departments are to be issued later.
The most recent advices from Korea report that the rioting, arson, and murder, headed by the disbanded Korean soldiers, is greatly diminished, and that the country is reverting to its normal condition so far as deeds of disorder and violence are concerned. The visit of the Crown Prince of Japan greatly gratified the pride and appeased the fears of the Imperial family and Yang-bans of Korea. Before leaving Seoul, Prince Ito laid the corner-stone of the new building of the Young Men’s Christian Association in that city. The Crown Prince of Korea, the son of Lady Om, whose guardianship Prince Ito has taken upon himself, accompanied by Ito, arrived in Tokyo, where he is to be placed in the Peers School, and was received with distinguished honors both by the Imperial Family of Japan and by the populace. The reports also show that the trade relations have had a significant increase between the two countries; but the most significant item is this: the exports of Korean products, which are for the most part rice and beans, exceed the imports from Japan by some 3,000,000 yen. The establishment of friendly relations between the two countries appears, therefore, to be moving forward rapidly; and the political and economical redemption of the peninsula appears to have been successfully begun. The first and, of necessity, most doubtful and difficult in the stages of the Passing of the Old Korea may therefore be said to have been already accomplished.
FOOTNOTES
[1] For the following description of Seoul, besides my own observations, I am chiefly indebted to a series of articles published during our stay there by Dr. G. Heber Jones in the Seoul Press.
[2] This may seem incredible, but it is a fact that, as late as the spring of 1907, even a basket of fruit could not be sent to the Emperor with the confidence that the eunuchs and palace servants would not steal it all. At every garden-party the dishes and even the chairs had to be carefully watched.
[3] It is now proper to say, since his own abdication and the Convention of July, 1907, have followed, that the Korean Emperor after repeated denials, confessed at the time to a faithful foreign friend (not a Japanese) that he had given to Mr. Hulbert a large sum of money to execute a certain commission the nature of which he kept secret. In spite of this friend’s importunate urging and vivid representation of what the consequences of the act might be to himself and to his family, His Majesty refused to telegraph a recall of the commission. He did, however, so far yield to the same pleading as to agree not to furnish a further sum of money which had been asked in behalf of the influence of another “foreign friend,” the editor of the most violently anti-Japanese newspaper.
[4] This document probably emanated from the same press in Seoul—conducted by a subject of Japan’s friendly ally, Great Britain—from which came the lying bulletin that afterward caused so much bloodshed on the morning of Friday, July 19th. It is a comfort to know that this same editor has since been indicted by his own Government for the crime of stirring up sedition, condemned to give bonds, and threatened with deportation if his offences are repeated.
[5] Hulbert, The History of Korea, I, p. 368.
[6] Japan, I, p. 69 f.