Yet dark as is the situation, it is not without hope. Slowly [[451]]and painfully the Coreans are learning that no nation is born in a day. Under the training of Christian teachers, a generation with new motives to action and new mental horizons, and fed with food to sustain the spirit, is coming on. Christianity is, with a remnant at least, making headway against the vices so common to this mild-mannered nation—skill in lying, stealing, gambling, drunkenness, and the social evil.
For ages and until Japan humbled China in 1894, Corea was so thoroughly and in all things the vassal and pupil of the Middle Kingdom, from which most of the elements of her civilization had been borrowed, that in the tributary kingdom there could be no patriotism in its highest sense, nor could political parties and cliques have any reason for existence except as they were concerned with aims that ended in selfishness. With the people in general, there was only anxiety to pay taxes, win the favor of the local magistrate, and escape the clutches of the law. With masters and rulers, there was ever pitiful fear of the great country China, and, under Confucianism, a desire to keep things as they were, mixed with impotent dread of change. Of pure love of country, of willingness to make sacrifices for their native land—that is almost a new thought as yet nourished by a few far-seeing patriots. In the evolution of the Corean, social and psychic, his present ethical stage is not beyond that of the group, clan, or neighborhood. It has not yet reached the individual. The majority of the people have that kind of patriotism which means the instinctive desire to preserve national identity. The one thing which they now fear, being in the vortex of the great storm of war and in the centre of the economic typhoon of the twentieth century, is national extinction. Even to-day the Coreans feel that they would rather live without the new things of civilization, such as railways, education, public hygiene, or even of righteous government, than be subject to an alien Power. History to the peninsular gives no uncertain sound as to what foreign intervention has always meant, that is, more oppression and even rapine. Seeing what has happened in half a lifetime, through the coming of the alien to Corea, the native does not want civilization at the hands of foreigners, though it may be that he will have to take it. Possibly through education and a new outlook upon the universe he will be glad to get it, even struggling for it until by assimilation [[452]]it becomes his own. In ancient history and the old days of the separation of nations, there were many civilizations and varying standards. In these latter days of the world’s brotherhood there is but one standard of civilization, and but one body of international law, which all must obey. The nation or kingdom that will not serve and obey this standard will pass out of history and perish. The signs that Corea realizes this truth and that her best men are seeking fraternity with their fellows for help and uplift are not wanting. Naturally they turn to the great republic, which since its beginning has steadfastly followed the policy of healing, helping, teaching, and uplifting the Asiatic nations.
Corea sent a delegate to the International Postal Union, which met in Washington, and in 1896 a postal system with stamps of four kinds was established, and under French auspices has been working in excellent condition. The stamps, as well as the national flag and documents, coins and other expressions of what is essentially representative of the Coreans as a nation, illustrate their repertoire of symbolism. The flag in blue, red, black, and white contains the two great emblems of the primitive Chinese philosophy and theory of the universe. Through these, the Corean sees all things visible and invisible produced as the results of their endless working and counteraction in combination and dissolution. The forces of heaven and earth, light and darkness, the positive and the negative, the male and the female, the in and the yo, are represented as two germs or commas in constant embrace or movement. This figure occupies the centre of the field and in each corner are the broken lines of the Pal Kwai, or eight diagrams of primitive Chinese tradition concerning the origin of language and writing. On the stamps we read the Chinese characters Tai han and Corea. Like China, old Japan, Russia, Turkey and other church nations, which unite more or less closely Church and State and are governed, in spite of all outward development and manifestations, by primitive or mediæval notions, Corea is a “Tei Koku,” or “divinely governed” realm, and so makes profession in Chinese characters, as does even modern Japan, though furnished with a Constitution and Diet. Besides these Chinese ideographs, we read in English, “Imperial Corean Post,” and in the en-mun or native script, a sentence to the same effect. The national flower is the plum blossom, and is figured with its leaves on either side of the [[453]]stem. The value or denomination of the stamp is given below both in English with Roman letters, and in Corean or en-mun. The date-mark made by the ink-stamp shows in the French spelling of the name of the country and capital the international character of the postal system. The national colors, as judged by the hangings in the royal palace, are yellow, red, and green.
Imitating other things imperial in adjoining or Western nations, the Government at Seoul established a Bureau of Decorations. These baubles, being liberally distributed, have helped handsomely to deplete the treasury of the little empire, most of whose people live in a state of semi-starvation or righteous discontent. The Emperor himself and his generals and ministers have had their breasts liberally adorned with various marks of the regard of the rulers of Japan, Great Britain, Russia, France, and Belgium, while between August 5, 1900, and December 20, 1902, the Corean Government had bestowed forty-two decorations, requiring a liberal outlay of bullion and artistic workmanship. To the Emperor of Japan, Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, the Kaiser of the German Empire, the President of the French Republic, the King of Italy, the King of the Belgians, the Emperor of Austria, and the Crown Prince of Japan, the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure was awarded. This contains the emblem in the centre of the flag. No Americans have been thus officially adorned, but the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure was offered to President McKinley, only to be declined; he having, happily for the American people, nothing to offer in return. The Great Decoration of the Plum Blossom has been given to Prince Kwacho of Japan and the Russian Prince Cyril, while the other decorations, containing the Pal Kwai of the eight mystic diagrams and the plum blossom or the national flower, in several grades or classes, have been offered to various servants or guests of the Government. Along with this brilliancy on foreign coat breasts, it is suggestive to read in the imperial budget for 1904 that of $19,560 appropriated to the bureau of decorations, the amount expended on bullion, medals, etc., was $7,431, and for salaries $10,130. Another interesting item, illuminating economic methods in Seoul, is that of $10,453 appropriated for the Mining Bureau. Of this amount the sum of $8,173 was spent for salaries and travelling, all the rest, except one item marked “miscellaneous $744,” being for office [[454]]expenses. In the Ceremonial Bureau $19,000 were used on salaries and office expenses out of a total of $21,508. Similar titbits of economic information are frequent under the heads of the Board of Generals (who supervise an army supposed to be five thousand strong) and that of Imperial Sacrifices, and others, explain very clearly the condition of a country in which there is no clear line of demarcation between the palace and the Government or administration, while eloquent in suggestions as to the reason why the larger part of Corea remains in a state of more or less chronic insurrection.
The budget for 1904 shows a total revenue of $14,214,573 made up of the following items: land tax, $9,703,591; house tax, $460,295; taxes on salt, fish, etc., $210,000; poll tax, $850,000; miscellaneous taxes, $200,000; arrears from 1903, $2,790,687.
The items of disbursement are as follows: Imperial privy purse, $1,013,359; imperial sacrifices, $186,641; household department, $327,541; war department, $5,180,614; finance department, $42,741,999; communications, $637,648; incidentals and extras, $1,843,503. Other items, of which the police bureau, $406,925, and the foreign department, $287,367, and educational, $205,673, are the more important, are pension bureau, board of generals, the cabinet government records, bureau of decorations, law department, department of agriculture, privy council, and special palace guard. It is pleasant to note that there is a surplus of $275, but the amount given for education and expended under the head of agriculture seems pitiful. The large items of the budget deal almost wholly with the salaries of native officials. One interesting and redeeming item among the “extras” is that “for helping shipwrecked men, $5,000.”
The greatest immediate need of Corea is a uniform and stable currency. Added to ancient evils was the action of Japan in adopting the gold standard in 1899, which threw all things commercial in Corea into dire confusion. On the 15th of December, 1901, the coinage law was published, by which Corea adopted the gold standard; but this law was never put into effect. The Japanese have frequently endeavored by various means to secure a standard currency.
Under the stimulus and pressure of foreign trade, Corea has now at least nine ports open to the residence and business of foreigners [[455]]besides the three or four inland places of traffic. Wonsan (Gensan), Fusan, and Chemulpo were opened by the treaties of 1876 and 1882, and have thriving settlements. The ginseng crop exported from these places is usually bought by Japanese, whose usual practice is that, for example, of May, 1902, when of the fifty thousand catties, ten thousand catties were burnt at Chemulpo, in order to keep up the price. On the 1st of October, 1898, Chinnampo and Mokpo were added to the list of open ports. The former lies on the northern shore of Ping-an inlet, twenty miles from the sea and forty miles from Ping-an city. It is now a thriving town with well laid-out streets. As the river leading to Ping-an is for ten miles or so below the city not navigable even by very small sea-going steamers, it can never be “a port” in the ordinary sense, but the returns of its trade are tabulated with those of Chinnampo, its outlet. Wiju (Ai-chiu) and Anju are almost the only other ports of value in the province of Ping-an. Anju is the landing stage of the American Mining Company for its mining materials and explosives.
Yongampo is in north latitude 38° 52′ and east longitude 126° 04′. When it was opened in 1898, Russians and Japanese took up land so eagerly that a collision seemed imminent. Later it came very near being made a Russian fortress as “Port Nicholas.” Mokpo, in the southwestern part of Chullado, is the natural maritime outlet of “the Garden of Corea.” Soon after it was made port of entry and trade, the wisdom shown in its selection was justified, for its growth has been healthy and rapid. From this point, in the autumn of 1902, a Boston gentleman went into the interior for a hunting trip of two months, during which time he killed three large tigers, besides deer and wild boar.
On May 1, 1899, Kunsan, Masampo, and Songchin were thrown open to foreign trade and residence. Kunsan is on the west coast, and like Mokpo, long famous for its abundant export of rice paid as revenue. It lies at the mouth of the river dividing the two rich and warm provinces of Chulla and Chung Chong, about half-way between Chemulpo and Mokpo, whence the rice, wheat, beans, hides, grasscloth, paper, manufactured articles in bamboo, fans, screens, mats, and marine products of many kinds are exported. Masampo, a few miles to the southwest of Fusan, in north latitude 35° 09′ and east longitude 128° 40′, has one of the finest harbors [[456]]in the world, which, when well fortified, might command the entrance to the Sea of Japan. In the negotiations between Japan and Russia, in 1903, this spot was jealously coveted by both Powers as the prize of the future, as the party possessing it might make it a Dardanelles, closing the sea between the island empire and the continent and making this body of water a Euxine. Russia tried to bind Japan not to fortify this or any other place on the east coast of Corea. Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and Coreans soon flocked to this favored port and have made business lively. Songchin, once the seat of an old stronghold, in the large northeastern province of Ham Kiung, bordering on Russia, which has no long navigable rivers, as in the south, lies about 120 miles from Wonsan and sends most of its products thither. It has a poor harbor in a foggy region, but fertile soil, fat cattle, and mineral riches are within reach. The Customs Reports for 1903 show a growing trade of $328,891. Eleven other landing stages bring up the total value of trade in Ham Kiung province to $1,676,714. In 1902 the total imports were nearly balanced by the exports from all Corea. Cotton is becoming an important item of sale abroad. Gold in 1902 was exported to the amount of $2,532,053. The total value of foreign trade has doubled during the past decade. So far the steamer tonnage is, like the general foreign trade, over three-fourths Japanese. Most emphatically and luminously does the modern economic as well as political history of the peninsula prove that the best interests of Japan and Corea are closely interwoven. Mutual benefit follows unity and friendship, reciprocal injury results from estrangement.