of peace and order with a view to bringing
about political change would be punished by penal servitude or imprisonment
for a period not exceeding ten years. The ordinance would apply to offences
committed by subjects of the Empire committed outside its domains, and it
was specially emphasized in the explanations of the new law given out that
it would apply to foreigners as well as Japanese or Koreans.

The Government-General introduced a new principle, generally regarded by
jurists of all lands as unjust and indefensible. They made the law
retroactive. People who were found guilty of this offence, their acts being
committed before the new law came into force, were to be sentenced under
it, and not under the much milder old law. This was done.

The Koreans were quickly to learn what the new military regime meant. One
of the first examples was at Cheamni, a village some miles from Suigen, on
the Seoul-Fusan Railway. Various rumours reached Seoul that this place had
been destroyed, and a party of Americans, including Mr. Curtice of the
Consulate, Mr. Underwood, son of the famous missionary pioneer, and himself
a missionary and a correspondent of the Japan _Advertiser_, went to
investigate. After considerable enquiry they reached a place which had been
a village of forty houses. They found only four or five standing. All the
rest were smoking ruins.

"We passed along the path," wrote the correspondent of the Japan
_Advertiser_, "which ran along the front of the village lengthwise, and in
about the middle we came on a compound surrounded by burnt poplars, which
was filled with glowing ashes. It was here that we found a body frightfully
burned and twisted, either of a young man or a woman. This place we found
later was the Christian church, and on coming down from another direction
on our return I found a second body, evidently that of a man, also badly
burned, lying just outside the church compound. The odour of burned flesh
in the vicinity of the church was sickening.

"We proceeded to the end of the village and climbed the hill, where we
found several groups of people huddled under little straw shelters, with a
few of their pitiful belongings about them. They were mostly women, some
old, others young mothers with babes at breast, but all sunk in the dull
apathy of abject misery and despair.

"Talking to them in their own language and with sympathy, Mr. Underwood
soon won the confidence of several and got the story of w