New Régime
KOREAN POLICEMEN
FOOTNOTES:
[59] I left Korea for China at Christmas, 1895, and after spending six months in travelling in the Chinese Far West, and three months among the Nan-tai San mountains in Japan, returned in the middle of October, 1896, and remained in Seoul until late in the winter of 1896-97.
CHAPTER XXXVII
LAST WORDS ON KOREA
The patient reader has now learned with me something of Korean history during the last three years, as well as of the reorganized methods of Government, and the education, trade, and finance of the country. He has also by proxy travelled in the interior, and has lived among the peasant farmers, seeing their industries, the huckstering which passes for trade, something of their domestic life and habits, and the superstitions by which they are enslaved, and has acquired some knowledge of the official and patrician exactions under which they suffer. He has seen the Koreans at home, with their limpness, laziness, dependence, and poverty, and Koreans under Russian rule raised into a thrifty and prosperous population. He can to some extent judge for himself of the prospects of a country which is incapable of standing alone, and which could support double its present population, and of the value of a territory which is possibly coveted by two Powers. Having acted as his guide so far, I should like to conclude with a few words on some of the subjects which have been glanced at in the course of these volumes.
Korea is not necessarily a poor country. Her resources are undeveloped, not exhausted. Her capacities for successful agriculture are scarcely exploited. Her climate is superb, her rainfall abundant, and her soil productive. Her hills and valleys contain coal, iron, copper, lead, and gold. The fisheries along her coast-line of 1,740 miles might be a source of untold wealth. She is inhabited by a hardy and hospitable race, and she has no beggar class.
On the other hand, the energies of her people lie dormant. The upper classes, paralyzed by the most absurd of social obligations, spend their lives in inactivity. To the middle class no careers are open; there are no skilled occupations to which they can turn their energies. The lower classes work no harder than is necessary to keep the wolf from the door, for very sufficient reasons. Even in Seoul, the largest mercantile establishments have hardly risen to the level of shops. Everything in Korea has been on a low, poor, mean level. Class privileges, class and official exactions, a total absence of justice, the insecurity of all earnings, a Government which has carried out the worst traditions on which all unreformed Oriental Governments are based, a class of official robbers steeped in intrigue, a monarch enfeebled by the seclusion of the palace and the pettinesses of the Seraglio, a close alliance with one of the most corrupt of empires, the mutual jealousies of interested foreigners, and an all-pervading and terrorizing superstition have done their best to reduce Korea to that condition of resourcelessness and dreary squalor in which I formed my first impression of her.
Nevertheless the resources are there, in her seas, her soil, and her hardy population.