ut.

They beat, they outraged, they murdered in a way and on a scale of which it
is difficult for any white man to speak with moderation. Koreans were
flogged to death for offences that did not deserve a sixpenny fine. They
were shot for mere awkwardness. Men were dispossessed of their homes by
every form of guile and trickery. It was my lot to hear from Koreans
themselves and from white men living in the districts, hundreds upon
hundreds of incidents of this time, all to the same effect. The outrages
were allowed to pass unpunished and unheeded. The Korean who approached the
office of a Japanese resident to complain was thrown out, as a rule, by the
underlings.

One act on the part of the Japanese surprised most of those who knew them
best. In Japan itself opium-smoking is prohibited under the heaviest
penalties, and elaborate precautions are taken to shut opium in any of its
forms out of the country. Strict anti-opium laws were also enforced in
Korea under the old administration. The Japanese, however, now permitted
numbers of their people to travel through the interior of Korea selling
morphia to the natives. In the northwest in particular this caused quite a
wave of morphia-mania.

The Japanese had evidently set themselves to acquire possession of as much
Korean land as possible. The military authorities staked out large portions
of the finest sites in the country, the river-lands near Seoul, the lands
around Pyeng-yang, great districts to the north, and fine strips all along
the railway. Hundreds of thousands of acres were thus acquired. A nominal
sum was paid as compensation to the Korean Government--a sum that did not
amount to one-twentieth part of the real value of the land. The people who
were turned out received, in many cases, nothing at all, and, in others,
one-tenth to one-twentieth of the fair value. The land was seized by the
military, nominally for purposes of war. Within a few months large parts of
it were being resold to Japanese builders and shopkeepers, and Japanese
settlements were growing up on them. This theft of land beggared thousands
of formerly prosperous people.

The Japanese Minister pushed forward, in the early days of the war, a
scheme of land appropriation that would have handed two-thirds of Korea
over at a blow to a Japanese concessionaire, a Mr. Nagamori, had it gone
through. Under this proposal all the waste lands of Korea, which included
all unworked mineral lands, were to be giv