Korea and her neighbors / A narrative of travel, with an account of the recent vicissitudes and present position of the country

by Isabella L. Bird

A great and universal curse in Korea is the habit in which thousands of able-bodied men indulge of hanging, or “sorning,” on relations or friends who are better off than themselves. There is no shame in the transaction, and there is no public opinion to condemn it. A man who has a certain income, however small, has to support many of his own kindred, his wife’s relations, many of his own friends, and the friends of his relatives. This partly explains the rush for Government offices, and their position as marketable commodities. To a man burdened with a horde of hangers-on, the one avenue of escape is official life, which, whether high or low, enables him to provide for them out of the public purse. This accounts for the continual creation of offices, with no other real object than the pensioning of the relatives and friends of the men who rule the country. Above all, this explains the frequency of conspiracies and small revolutions in Korea. Principle is rarely at stake, and no Korean revolutionist intends to risk his life in support of any conviction.

Hundreds of men, strong in health and of average intelligence, are at this moment hanging on for everything, even their tobacco, to high officials in Seoul, eating three meals a day, gossiping and plotting misdeeds, the feeling of honorable independence being unknown. When it is desirable to get rid of them, or it is impossible to keep them longer, offices are created or obtained for them. Hence Government employment is scarcely better than a “free coup” for this class of rubbish. The factious political disturbances which have disgraced Korea for many years have not been conflicts of principle at all, but fights for the Government position which gives its holder the disposal of offices and money. The suspiciousness which prevents high officials from working together is also partly due to the desire of every Minister to get more influence with the King than his colleagues, and so secure more appointments for his relations and friends. The author of the Korean Dictionary states that the word for work in Korean is synonymous with “loss,” “evil,” “misfortune,” and the man who leads an idle life proves his right to a place among the gentry. The strongest claim for office which an official puts forward for a protégé is that he cannot make a living. Such persons when appointed do little, and often nothing, except draw their salaries and “squeeze” where they can!

I have repeated almost ad nauseam that the cultivator of the soil is the ultimate sponge. The farmers work harder than any other class, and could easily double the production of the land, their methods, though somewhat primitive, being fairly well adapted to the soil and climate. But having no security for their gains, they are content to produce only what will feed and clothe their families, and are afraid to build better houses or to dress respectably. There are innumerable peasant farmers who have gone on reducing their acreage of culture year by year, owing to the exactions and forced loans of magistrates and yang-bans, and who now only raise what will enable them to procure three meals a day. It is not wonderful that classes whose manifest destiny is to be squeezed, should have sunk down to a dead level of indifference, inertia, apathy, and listlessness.

In spite of reforms, the Korean nation still consists of but two classes, the Robbers and the Robbed,—the official class recruited from the yang-bans, the licensed vampires of the country, and the Ha-in, literally “low men,” a residuum of fully four-fifths of the population, whose raison d’être is to supply the blood for the vampires to suck.

Out of such unpromising materials the new nation has to be constructed, by education, by protecting the producing classes, by punishing dishonest officials, and by the imposition of a labor test in all Government offices, i.e. by paying only for work actually done.

That reforms are not hopeless, if carried out under firm and capable foreign supervision, is shown by what has been accomplished in the Treasury Department in one year. No Korean office was in a more chaotic and corrupt condition, and the ramifications of its corruption were spread all through the Provinces. Much was hoped when Mr. M’Leavy Brown accepted the thankless position of Financial Adviser, from his known force of character and remarkable financial capacity, but no one would have ventured to predict what has actually occurred.

Although his efforts at financial reform have been thwarted at every turn, not alone by the rapacity of the King’s male and female favorites, and the measureless cunning and craft of corrupt officials, who incite the Sovereign to actions concerning money which are subversive of the fairest schemes of financial rectitude, but by chicane, fraud, and corruption in every department; by the absence of trustworthy subordinates; by infamous traditional customs; and the fact that every man in office, and every man hoping for office, is pledged by his personal interest to oppose every effort at reform actively or passively, Korean finance stands thus at the close of 1897.

In a few months the Augean stable of the Treasury Department in Seoul has been cleansed; the accounts are kept on a uniform system, and with the utmost exactitude; “value received” precedes payments for work; an army of drones, hanging on to all departments and subsisting on public money, has been disbanded; a partial estimate has been formed of the revenue which the Provinces ought to produce; superfluous officials unworthily appointed find that their salaries are not forthcoming; every man entitled to receive payment is paid at the end of every month; nothing is in arrears; great public improvements are carried out with a careful supervision which ensures rigid economy; the accounts of every Department undergo strict scrutiny; no detail is thought unworthy of attention, and instead of Korea being bankrupt, as both her friends and enemies supposed she would be in July, 1896, she closed the financial year in April, 1897, with every account paid and a million and a half in the Treasury, out of which she has repaid one million of the Japanese loan of three millions. If foreign advisers of similar calibre and capacity were attached to all the departments of State similar results might in time be obtained.

One thing is certain, that the war and the period of the energetic ascendency of Japan have given Korea so rude a shake, and have so thoroughly discredited various customs and institutions previously venerated for their antiquity, that no retrograde movements, such as have been to some extent in progress in 1897, can replace her in the old grooves.

Seoul is Korea for most practical purposes, and the working of the Western leaven, the new impulses and modes of thought introduced by Western education, the inevitable contact with foreigners, and the influence of a free Press are through Seoul slowly affecting the nation. Under the shadow of Chinese suzerainty the Korean yang-ban enjoyed practically unlimited opportunities for the extortions and tyrannies which were the atmosphere of patrician life. Japan introduced a new theory on this subject, and practically gave the masses to understand that they possess rights which the classes are bound to respect, and the Press takes the same line.