.

Men guessed what was coming. There were mutterings, especially among the
students. But the student who spoke bravely, even behind closed doors
to-day, found himself in jail by evening. The very walls seemed to have
ears.

Then it was remarked that the Ministers of State had not been seen for some
days. They had shut themselves in, refusing to see all callers. They feared
assassination, for they had sold their country. Policemen and troops were
waiting within easy calls from their homes, lest mobs should try to burn
them out, like rats out of their holes.

And then the news came. Korea had ceased to exist as an even nominally
independent or separate country. Japan had swallowed it up. The
Emperor--poor fool--was to step off his throne. After four thousand years,
there was to be no more a throne of Korea. The Resident-General would now
be Governor-General. The name of the nation was to be wiped out--henceforth
it was to be Chosen, a province of Japan. Its people were to be remade into
a lesser kind of Japanese, and the more adept they were in making the
change, the less they would suffer. They were to have certain benefits. To
mark the auspicious occasion there would be an amnesty--but a man who had
tried to kill the traitor Premier would not be in it. Five per cent of
taxes and all unpaid fiscal dues would be remitted. Let the people rejoice!

The Japanese expected an uprising, and were all ready for one. "Every man
should be ready to fight and die in the cause of his nation's
independence," they said tauntingly to the Koreans. But the people's
leaders kept them in. Up on the hills, the Righteous Army was still
struggling. The people must wait for better times.

One man stuck a proclamation on the West Gate, threatening death to the
traitors. Man after man, scholars, old soldiers, men who loved Korea,
committed suicide, after telling of their grief. "Why should we live when
our land is dead?" they asked.

The Japanese sneered because the people did nothing. "We may assume,
indeed, that all fear of a national uprising is now past," declared a
semi-Government organ. "The nation obviously has no leaders competent to
execute and direct a crusade in the cause of independence. Whether that
lack is due to adroit management on the part of the Japanese or to
unpatriotic apathy on the part of the Koreans we cannot pretend to judge."

The Japanese decree announcing the annexation of the country was in itself
an acknowledg