“(1) The Emperor of Corea shall concede to the Emperor of Japan the Corean sovereignty, together with all territorial rights.
“(2) The Sovereign Imperial Household is to be treated as a quasi-Imperial Family of Japan, continuing to have the annual allowance of 1,500,000 yen, while members of the Imperial Family and meritorious persons of the country are to be created peers, or endowed with certain grants.
“(3) The name Corea shall be changed into ‘Chō-sen.’
“(4) The Corean Cabinet being abolished, the Residency-General shall be changed into a government of Governor-General, while as to the administrative business and customs tariff, there will be no change for the present.”
The cost to Japan of the amalgamation is estimated at yen, 30,000,000, or $15,000,000. Seventy-five Coreans of distinguished families were created peers of Japan, and the monetary grants in yen were conferred as follows: to a baron, 50,000; to a viscount, 100,000; to a count, 150,000; and to a marquis, 200,000. As with the kugé, or court nobles, to prevent waste, the principal is retained in the Imperial Treasury, and the interest promptly paid at frequent intervals. Provision has been made for other meritorious persons, and the military conscription will not be put in force for ten years yet. Meanwhile, besides thousands of Corean students in Tokio, delegations of leading men and women of Chō-sen have visited and travelled in Japan.
It has always been a sore spot with the Coreans that the United States refused to intervene, though in the first article of the treaty of May 22, 1882, promise was made that “if other Powers deal unjustly or oppressively with either Government, the other will exert their good offices, on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable arrangement, thus showing their friendly feeling.” Yet apart from the settled policy of non-intervention in the affairs of foreign nations, the United States was but one of several nations that, with a significant promptness and unanimity, [[510]]gladly called home their legations and handed over the control of Corea to Japan.
There is nothing mysterious to the student in the loss of Corea’s sovereignty and her absorption in the Japanese Empire. A survey of her history and a view of the world’s movement since 1866 shows inexorably the law of cause and effect. It was the weakness of Corea to be not only shut off from the world, but in her hermitage so to exaggerate antiquity and its importance as to leave the nation helpless in the modern clash of civilizations, when Orient and Occident are meeting to merge into one world society. The first infirmity of the Coreans of insular mind arises from long contact with the history and literature of the Chinese. Stimulating to the intellect, this has paralyzed mental initiative and swamped originality. The Corean imagined that China’s was the beginning and end of all wisdom. Added to this was the delusion that a knowledge of letters was in itself sufficient to preserve both society and national sovereignty.
Old Japan suffered frightfully, but not fatally, from the same disease. In Corea’s case, this insanity of literary pride was exaggerated into a crime when, after 1392, the popular religion was ruthlessly destroyed, the people robbed of their teachers, and the country given over to superstition and ignorance by a Government which Lieutenant Foulk, in 1883, after prolonged tours within the country and study of the details of administration, declared was but armed robbery.
There was no political or social unity in the Corean peninsula until the tenth century. The chief force in welding together the various tribes and peoples into the astonishing unity and similarity now visible among the people and villages from Quelpart to the Ever White Mountain was Buddhism. The missionaries of this faith, coming from Thibet and China, gave the peninsulars art, architecture, literature, folk-lore, a noble path of morals for guidance in this life, vast consolations for the future, and pretty much everything that means culture, refinement, and civilization. In very early days, before Mikadoism in Japan was formulated into a militant dogma, the islanders and the peninsulars, the Japanese and the Coreans, were virtually one and the same people, and in about the same stage of civilization. In the reaction of nature [[511]]upon man and of man upon nature, during ten centuries, the two peoples were differentiated, and the two languages—almost exactly the same in structure, thus proving their common origin—developed their vocabulary and local pronunciation. The two nations, according to their ethnic mixtures, heredity and environment, grew further and further apart. Nevertheless, to-day, after a millennium of separation, the underlying elements are so much greater than the surface differences that the prospects of an amalgamation of the two peoples are decidedly promising.
In the main, the history of Corea is like its landscape. Her political annals, as thus far studied, seem like monotonous undergrowth among which loom indistinct figure-heads. As bare as her desolated coast or denuded mountains, the scene in historic perspective reminds one of the peninsula’s lava beds, her square leagues of disintegrated granite, or her waste lands, out of which rise sculptured rocks, and whence emerge the Miryeks, or stone colossi, amid ruins surrounded with forests. To a native scholar his nation’s chronicles are not without a rugged grandeur of their own, besides a rich coloring that recalls the rock-scenery of Corea when looked at in the sunlight.