I regret to have to write anything to the King’s disadvantage. Personally I have found him truly courteous and kind, as he is to all foreigners. He has amiable characteristics, and I believe a certain amount of patriotic feeling. But as he is an all-important element of the present and future condition of Korea, it would be misleading and dishonest to pass over without remark such characteristics of his character and rule as are disastrous to Korea, bearing in mind in extenuation of them that he is the product of five centuries of a dynastic tradition which has practically taught that public business and the interests of the country mean for the Sovereign simply getting offices and pay for favorites, and that statesmanship consists in playing off one Minister against another.
Novelties in the Seoul streets were the fine physique and long gray uniforms of Colonel Putiata and his subordinates, three officers and ten drill-instructors, who arrived to drill and discipline the Korean army, the American military adviser having proved a failure, while the troops drilled by the Japanese were mutinous and rapacious, and the Japanese drill-instructors had retired with the rest of the régime. This “Military Commission” was doing its work with characteristic vigor and thoroughness, and the flat-faced, pleasant-looking, non-commissioned officers, with their drilled slouch, serviceable uniforms, and long boots were always an attraction to the crowd. A novelty, too, was the sight of the Korean cadet corps of thirty-seven young men of good families and seven officers, marching twice daily between the drill ground of the Korean troops close to the Kyeng-pok Palace and their own barracks behind the Russian Legation, with drums beating and colors flying. These young men, who are to receive a two years’ military education from Russian officers, are under severe discipline, and were greatly surprised to find that servants were a prohibited luxury, and that their training involved the cleaning and keeping bright of their own rifles and accoutrements, and hard work for many hours of the day. The army now consists of 4,300 men in Seoul, 800 of whom are drilled as a bodyguard for the King, and 1,200 in the provinces, in Japanese uniforms, and equipped (so far as they go) with 3,000 Berdan rifles presented by Russia to Korea. The drill and words of command are Russian.
A standing army of 2,000 men would have been sufficient for all purposes in Korea, and as far as her need goes an army of 6,000 is an unblushing extravagance and a heavy drain on her resources. It is most probable that a force drilled and armed by Russia, accustomed to obey Russian orders and animated by an intense hereditary hatred of Japan, would prove a valuable corps d’armée to Russia in the event of war with that ambitious and restless empire.
The old kesu or gens d’armes with their picturesque dresses and long red plumes are now only to be seen, and that rarely, in attendance on officials of the Korean Government. Seoul is now policed, much overpoliced, for it has a force of 1,200 men, when a quarter of that number would be sufficient for its orderly population. Everywhere numbers of slouching men on and off duty, in Japanese semi-military uniforms, with shocks of hair behind their ears and swords in nickel-plated scabbards by their sides, suggest useless and extravagant expenditure. The soldiers and police, by an unwise arrangement made by the Japanese, and now scarcely possible to alter, are enormously overpaid, the soldiers receiving five dollars and a half a month, “all found,” and the police from eight to ten, only finding their food. The Korean army is about the most highly paid in the world. The average Korean in his great baggy trousers, high, perishable, broad-brimmed hat, capacious sleeves, and long flapping white coat, is usually a docile and harmless man; but European clothes and arms transform him into a truculent, insubordinate, and ofttimes brutal person, without civic sympathies or patriotism, greedy of power and spoil. Detachments of soldiers scattered through the country were a terror to the people from their brutality and marauding propensities early in 1897, and unless Russian officers are more successful than their predecessors in disciplining the raw material, an overpaid army, too large for the requirements of the country, may prove a source of weakness and frequent disorder.
KOREAN CADET CORPS AND RUSSIAN DRILL INSTRUCTORS.
Seoul in many parts, specially in the direction of the south and west gates, was literally not recognizable. Streets, with a minimum width of 55 feet, with deep stone-lined channels on both sides, bridged by stone slabs, had replaced the foul alleys, which were breeding-grounds of cholera. Narrow lanes had been widened, slimy runlets had been paved, roadways were no longer “free coups” for refuse, bicyclists “scorched” along broad, level streets, “express wagons” were looming in the near future, preparations were being made for the building of a French hotel in a fine situation, shops with glass fronts had been erected in numbers, an order forbidding the throwing of refuse into the streets was enforced,—refuse matter is now removed from the city by official scavengers, and Seoul, from having been the foulest is now on its way to being the cleanest city of the Far East!
This extraordinary metamorphosis was the work of four months, and is due to the energy and capacity of the Chief Commissioner of Customs, ably seconded by the capable and intelligent Governor of the city, Ye Cha Yun, who had acquainted himself with the working of municipal affairs in Washington, and who with a rare modesty refused to take any credit to himself for the city improvements, saying that it was all due to Mr. M’Leavy Brown.
Old Seoul, with its festering alleys, its winter accumulations of every species of filth, its ankle-deep mud and its foulness, which lacked, the redeeming element of picturesqueness, is being fast improved off the face of the earth. Yet it is chiefly a restoration, for the dark, narrow alleys which lingered on till the autumn of 1896 were but the result of gradual encroachments on broad roadways, the remains of the marginal channels of which were discovered.
What was done (and is being done) was to pull down the houses, compensate their owners, restore the old channels, and insist that the houses should be rebuilt at a uniform distance behind them. Along the fine broad streets thus restored tiled roofs have largely replaced thatch, in many cases the lower parts of the walls have been rebuilt of stone instead of wattle, and attempts at decoration and neatness are apparent in many of the house and shop fronts, while many of the smoke-holes, which vomit forth the smoke of the kang fires directly into the street, are now fitted with glittering chimneys, constructed out of American kerosene tins.