d. But when I
arrived before the Public Procurator, I forgot what I had been taught to
say, and wept, asking the officials to read what I had to confess. This
they did, and I said, 'Yes, yes.'"

Choi Che-kiu, a petty trader, repudiated his confession of having gone with
a party to Sun-chon.

"Had such a large party attempted to go to the station," he said, "they
must infallibly have been arrested on the first day. Were I guilty I would
be ready to die at once. The whole story was invented by officials, and I
was obliged to acquiesce in it by severe torture. One night I was taken to
Nanzan hill by two policemen, suspended from a pine tree and a sharp sword
put to my throat. Thinking I was going to be killed, I consented to say
'Yes' to any question put to me."

"No force can make you tell such a story as this, unless you consent
voluntarily," interposed the Court.

"You may well say that," replied the prisoner, grimly. "But with the blade
of a sword in my face and a lighted cigarette pressed against my body, I
preferred acquiescence in a story, which they told me that Kim Syong had
already confessed, to death."

The prisoner paused, and the Judge looked at him with his head on one side.
Suddenly the prisoner burst into a passion of weeping, with loud,
incoherent cries.

In the previous trial one of the prisoners, Kim Ik-kyo, was asked why he
admitted all the facts at his preliminary examination. "If the police were
to go down Chong-no (one of the busiest streets in Seoul)," he replied,
"and indiscriminately arrest a number of passers-by, and then examine them
by putting them to torture, I am sure they would soon confess to having
taken part in a plot."

The same thing was put in another way by a prisoner, Kim Eung-pong. He
related a long story of torture by binding, hanging, beating and burning,
continued for fifteen days, during which he was often threatened with
death. Then he was taken to the "supreme enquiry" office of the police
headquarters, where he was stripped naked and beaten with an iron bar from
the stove. This office, he understood, had control and power of life or
death over the whole peninsula, so he was compelled to confess all that
they wanted. "I even would have said that I killed my father, if they put
it to me," he added.

Hear the tale of An Sei-whan. As An was called up in the Appeal Court, a
wave of pity passed over the white men there, for An was a miserable
object, pale and emaciated. H