[1] Commodore B. W. Shufeldt was born in Dutchess County, New York, in 1822, and entered the navy in 1839, serving ten years on foreign stations and in the coast survey. One cruise to the west coast of Africa interested him in the negro colony of Liberia, in which he has ever since felt concern. From 1850 to 1860, our navy being in a languishing state, he was engaged in the mercantile marine service, and in organizing a transit route across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In 1860 an article of his on the slave trade between the Island of Cuba and the coast of Africa, drew the attention of the government to him, and led to his appointment of Consul-General at Havana. The slave-trade was soon effectually broken up, and through the trying period of the first half of the civil war, he was occupied in his civil duties, at one time going to Mexico on a confidential mission to President Juarez, passing unrecognized through the French lines. He was on blockade duty during the last two years of the civil war. In 1865 he went to China, as flag-captain of the Hartford, and commanding the Wachusett visited Corea. In 1870 he organized a party for the survey of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, his report being made the basis of Captain Eads’ ship-railway project. The official history of the semi-diplomatic cruise of the Ticonderoga round the world (1878–1880) has been written, but has not yet been published. [↑]
CHAPTER XLIX.
THE ECONOMIC CONDITION OF COREA.
For nearly a quarter of a century Corea, the once hermit nation, has been opened to intercourse with the world, and the student has had facilities for understanding the country and people and realizing what are the social and political problems of humanity in the peninsula.
As in most old Asiatic states, so in Corea, there is an almost total absence of an intelligent middle class, which in the West is the characteristic of progressive nations. In the Land of Morning Radiance there is a governing minority consisting of about one-tenth of the whole population. These, the Yangban (civil and military), living in ancient privilege and prerogative and virtually paying no taxes or tolls, prey upon the common people. The great bulk, that is, nine-tenths of the population, is agricultural and is gathered in hamlets and villages.
The typical Corean tills the soil, in which occupation, after ages of unprogressive routine, he has come to his present mental status. There is not even a distinct manufacturing class in Corea, for nearly all industry is still in the cottage. The few articles needed by the laborer for the floor, the wall, and the kitchen are made by the farmer during his winter hours, and his women-folk weave and make up the clothing. The average carpenter, blacksmith, and stone mason is simply a laborer on the land with added skill in a special line. Even the fisherman cultivates the soil. The village schoolmaster is a son of the farmer of the better class. There are groups of population-office-holders and their retainers and hangers-on, shopkeepers and traders, butchers, porters, miners, junk-sailors, and innkeepers, sorcerers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers, but, all told, the number of men who do not live on the soil form but a decimal fraction in the national household.
For these compelling reasons the problems of internal government [[444]]relate almost wholly to the woe or weal of the tillers of the soil. During the summer of six months the average Corean stands bare-legged in the mud, planting or cultivating grain. His wife and children, especially his daughters, help him in the raising of rice, barley, wheat, and beans, and in the harvesting and securing of the final products. During the four cold months of the year he is at work gathering fuel or making mats, sandals, screens, or thatch. During the first and seventh moons he enjoys an easy time, doing little or nothing, and these two months are like holiday. The average income of a Corean farmer is about thirty dollars a year. The average house in Corea consists only of mud, straw, twine, and wood, above a foundation of earth faced with stone and worth but a few dollars. The price of waste land is from one to five dollars an acre, and of cultivated fertile soil from ten to sixty dollars an acre. The lots are poorly marked and boundary quarrels are incessant. The Corean farmer knows little about scientific irrigation or variety in fertilizers, dried grass being his chief manure. The mountains are greatly denuded of their forests, and alternate droughts and floods work awful disasters. With a naturally good soil and fine climate, agriculture is yet in a backward condition. It is said that the Japanese in the sixteenth century taught the Coreans the cultivation of rice, millions of bushels of which, under stimulus from the same source, they are now able to export annually. In recent years the Japanese have attempted to secure control of the waste lands of Corea so as to develop them, not only for the production of cereals, vegetable wax, paper fibre, and stuff for weaving, but also for cotton to supply the demands of the Osaka mills. Their demands, pressed too severely in July, 1904, were the cause of vigorous native protest in great public meetings.
The Corean rustic is, as a rule, illiterate. Probably only about four out of ten males of the farming class can read either Chinese or Corean, but counting in the women it is estimated that about eighty-five per cent of the people can neither read nor write, though the percentage varies greatly with the locality. As a general thing, there is more acquaintance with books and writing in the southern than in the northern provinces. It is pitiful to find in the Budget for 1904 that but $27,718 are appropriated for schools outside of Seoul, the latter receiving $135,074, of which [[445]]the sum of $44,220 goes to foreign teachers in the English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese language schools. Although since 1895 the old civil-service examinations have been abolished and there has been a Department of Education, it has thus far had little influence upon the country at large. In the central office in 1904, out of $28,617 appropriated, $19,857 went for salaries and office expenses, $6,500 being for text-book printing.
The Corean farmer is simple in his dress, food, and habits. He does not journey far from home. Although the high-roads are lively with travellers, one sees not the farmer but the literati, the traders, and the porters. Few country folks ever visit the large cities, and in regions near the capital few have seen Seoul. Custom is the eternal law to the rustic, who is patient, bearing extortion until flesh and blood can stand it no longer, when he rises in revolt against his oppressor. Yet it is against the bad man, not the system itself, that he protests. After the obnoxious officer has been recalled or driven away and temporary relief is obtained, the Corean farmer settles down into a good tax-paying subject as of yore, and unless something like the Tong Hak movement stirs him, his wheel of life quickly slips again into the rut of routine. As long as he can get enough to eat he is content. When oppression and robbery are joined to Nature’s niggardliness, he and his comrades are transformed into a howling mob of starving malcontents, ready for bloody vengeance.