ea. The thermometer was at zero;
the snow covered the ground, and there wasn't a fire in a single room in
that prison save where the Japanese guards were staying, and they were
huddled around a roaring coal stove.

And this is the show prison of the whole Peninsula. The Japanese take
visitors through it. But to an American even it is fit only for the
darkness of the Middle Ages.

In its limited quarters I saw ten and fifteen young girls, sweet faced,
cultured, educated school girls, huddled together in narrow rooms,
without a single chair, so closely packed that they were seated on the
floor like bees in a hive.

After six months of this awful life the girl of whom I speak was about
to be released.

The guard questioned her. "Now what are you going to do?"

Her answer came, quick as a shot, although she knew that it would send
her back to the hell from which she was about to be released.

"It is either liberty for Korea or we die!" she said.

And in three minutes, beaten, and dragged on the ground by the hair she
was thrown into the cell from which she had been taken; to rot and die
as far as the Japanese were concerned.

Another girl who had been kept in jail 135 days without even a charge
having been preferred against her was released. Her old mother came to
meet her and while in Seoul the mother attended an Independence Meeting
for women. The whole crowd of women then went to the Police Station and
shouted "Mansei"!

The mother was arrested and cruelly beaten in spite of her seventy-five
years of age.

When they were through beating her they said, "Now will you refrain from
yelling, 'Mansei!'"

"Never!" said this old woman.

Then they took a bar of iron and beat her over the legs until she
dropped.

"Now will you refrain from yelling 'Mansei?'"

The old woman was weak, but in a low, painful whisper said, "The next
time the women come to yell, if I am able to walk I will be with them!"

Another old woman was brought to prison for yelling "Mansei!" When they
asked her why she yelled "Mansei" she answered in a sentence that sums
up the entire spirit that is in the woman-heart of Korea.

"I have only one word in my head and that is 'Mansei!'"

I personally, one day in Korea, saw the Japanese gendarmes come for a
Korean girl. She was one of the most popular girls in the American
Methodist Missionary School.

It was the common custom for Japanese officials to come and take Korean
girls out of these