Page:A modern pioneer in Korea-Henry G. Appenzeller-by William Elliot Griffis.djvu/36

 28 and bracing climate, with the steady discipline of uncertainty, would breed a tougher type of man, and richer in moral stamina. One hardly looks in Korea for the kind of people that are grown in Old or New England, or in Scotland, Holland, Denmark, or Scandinavia. The Korean's gifts and graces, which are many, are otherwise manifested.

Over the greater part of the peninsular area there is no question as to the fertility of the soil. Yet despite the abundant watering of the land, in its valleys and river channels, the supply from the river of heaven is by no means regular. Since rice is the most precarious of all crops, requiring plenty of moisture at certain critical periods, the crop fails if the rain does not fall in the nick of time. Korea, like China and old Japan, has often known what famine is, and the Government realises that when the storehouses are empty, riot, tumult, and political disorder, sprout in place of grain. "Keep their bellies full" was one of Laotsze's maxims for the social quiet of the masses. Oftener there is patiently borne suffering, with multitudinous deaths. On the whole, however, the conditions favouring agriculture are excellent. In the long run, Korea has been a land in which people were fairly well fed, cases of starvation not common, and beggars rare.

In a word, Korea, as it comes from the hand of God and as Nature has endowed it, is gloriously beautiful, like that land of promise described in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy—if the natives and men besotted with Confucianism only knew