s and
staying power of her monster opponent must overwhelm her.

The development of Korea proceeded slowly. It seemed as though there were
some powerful force behind all the efforts of more enlightened Koreans to
prevent effective reforms from being carried out The Japanese were, as was
natural the most numerous settlers in the land, and their conduct did not
win them the popular affection. Takezoi's disastrous venture inflicted for
a time a heavy blow on Japanese prestige. The Japanese dead lay unburied in
the streets for the dogs to eat. China was momentarily supreme. "The whole
mass of the people are violently pro-Chinese in their sentiments," the
American representative stated in a private despatch to his Government,
"and so violently anti-Japanese that it is impossible to obtain other than
a volume of execrations and vituperations against them when questioned," A
semi-official Japanese statement that their Minister and his troops had
gone to the palace at the King's request, to defend him, made the matter
rather worse.

The affair would have been more quickly forgotten but for the overbearing
attitude of Japanese settlers towards the Korean people, and of Japanese
Ministers towards the Korean Government. Officially they advanced claims so
unjust that they aroused the protest of other foreigners. The attitude of
the Japanese settlers was summed up by Lord (then the Hon. G.N.) Curzon,
the famous British statesman, after a visit in the early nineties. "The
race hatred between Koreans and Japanese," he wrote, "is the most striking
phenomenon in contemporary Chosen. Civil and obliging in their own country,
the Japanese develop in Korea a faculty for bullying and bluster that is
the result partly of nation vanity, partly of memories of the past. The
lower orders ill-treat the Koreans on every possible opportunity, and are
cordially detested by them in return."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Problems of the Far East," London, 1894.]

The old Regent returned from China in 1885, to find his power largely gone,
at least so far as the Court was concerned. But he still had friends and
adherents scattered all over the country. Furious with the Chinese for his
arrest and imprisonment, he threw himself into the arms of the Japanese.
They found in him a very useful instrument.

Korea has for centuries been a land of secret societies. A new society now
sprang up, and spread with amazing rapidity, the Tong-haks. It was
anti-foreign and anti-