very

is natural that the Chinese soldiers should not be brave, and generally unwilling to throw away their lives for a country which does not appreciate their services. Their pay is meagre, and often curtailed by dishonest superiors; far from any pensions being given to the disabled, and to the relations of the killed in battle, even medical assistance and care of the wounded are not provided, and the end of a war generally means the dismissal of all those who have been hastily enlisted at the moment of danger.

While the lower classes in China are not warlike and are not encouraged to become so, the upper classes are almost totally ignorant of the scientific civilisation of the West and averse to it, as they consider its advent as a certain forerunner of the fall of their oligarchy. They consider that the only hope of continuance of their system lies in keeping the people ignorant, not only of what happens in other nations, but even in other provinces of the Chinese Empire. All attempts to achieve what we regard as freedom is completely smothered; railways are not allowed to be built, and even good common roads are very seldom to be found in the interior, so that water-carriage of some kind is the general means of travelling over the greater part of the country. In the intellectual field matters are even worse the ignorance even of the most learned Chinese is incredible; they lack that mathematical training which is considered necessary to all educated persons in the West, and which has produced those bold general

isations in all branches of science which have revolutionised the thought of Europe and America. In China the only military examinations consist in bending tough bows, lifting heavy weights and handling the sword.

If we keep in view all these simultaneous facts which operate in directing the conduct of the two countries, we shall find that the struggle in the Far East was not simply a war between two nations, but a war between the past and the present, between Western civilisation and a sporadic survival of the worn-out Eastern civilization; an encounter between such tactics as were employed by Agamemnon at Troy and those that might have been conceived by Moltke.

Though we point out China as the champion of the actions

the

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China

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past, we must not consider that she enacts her part consistently the worship of her ancient world is rather a pretext to avoid the trouble of reform than a sincere attachment to the great men of the past: she does not follow their precepts, and there perhaps no country in the world where there is such a scarcity of ancient monuments-in fact, they may be said to be entirely absent. At the same time it is necessary to dispel the error bred by ignorance, that China has never changed; there is hardly any country that has undergone so many political vicissitudes. Her history counts twenty-four dynasties, many of which were foreign, and established themselves by a bloody conquest of the country: every political change has brought with it a complete change of

pool !!!

dress and customs, and a considerable change in the internal administration. In the points In the points just dealt with, Japan may be considered far more conservative than China; she has had but one dynasty in the course of her whole history, and the internal changes up to the last generation have been far less than those of her neighbour; at the same time she has a worship for the great men of the past, and their heroic exploits are ever present in the mind of the people.

It has been fashionable among writers on the Far East to lay stress on the mysterious and awe-striking process which threatened the world in a near future : the "Awakening of China." These speculations about the future blinded them to what was really happening, the awakening of Japan: the phenomenon of a race that had slumbered for centuries in its beautiful ocean home, in those clusters of islands that remind one of Hellas, almost ignorant of the world that surrounded it, save for the casual advent of a Buddhist missionary, a Corean artist or a wave-tossed European, suddenly awakening to consciousness that it held a place in the world and resolved that it should be one of glory and honour.

PART I.

THE HISTORY OF THE COREAN QUESTION.

CHAPTER I.

SHORT SKETCH OF THE HISTORICAL RELATIONS OF

THE THREE COUNTRIES.

THE Corean question which has caused the war between China and Japan has its origin far into the past, and, to understand it clearly, a glance at the historical relations of the three countries is absolutely necessary.

China, Corea, and Japan form a group of nations connected by a bond of a peculiar nature, which it is difficult for a European reader to understand. It is not alone by their geographical proximity, and by the ancient civilisation born in the North of China, which gradually spread into Corea and Japan; nor by the diffusion of Buddhism, which China receiving from India passed on to her Eastern neighbours, that they feel bound together, but still more

by the use of the characters, invented in China, which spread into Corea and Japan, and are still used, notwithstanding both those countries have an

alphabetical writing of their own.

Chinese characters

do not necessarily express a sound, their primary use is to represent an idea or object, and they have thus become the written medium of communication for three nations whose languages are totally different. It is difficult to render this fact intelligible to those who are unacquainted with Chinese characters, but the following parallel case in the West may be of some assistance. All the nations of Europe use the Arabic figures, though they correspond to very different sounds in the various languages of the continent, and a traveller is able to understand the numbers on shop-doors, and the hours of departure of a railway train, though he is unable to read them with their foreign pronunciation. What happens in these few cases in Europe occurs in all cases where writing is used in the Far East. A welleducated Chinese, Japanese, or Corean can understand almost everything which is written in either of the other two neighbouring countries, though he cannot speak a word of their languages. This common medium of communication, which is especially useful for all those higher forms of thought which are best expressed and transmitted by writing, has created a deep-seated bond between nations. which, by nature, would have little in common.

In fact, the three nations are very different both physically and intellectually the Japanese are vivacious, artistic, warlike, and ever ready to adopt improvements from abroad; the Chinese are mostly