Page:In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908).djvu/284



will need no argument for those familiar with the habitual ways of the Korean Government in dealing with foreign affairs to establish the necessity that Japan should make more definite, explicit, and comprehensive, the Protocols of February 23 and August 22, 1904. Foreign affairs have always been with the Emperor and Court of Korea a particularly favorable but mischievous sphere for intrigue and intermeddling. The Foreign Office has never had any real control over the agents of the government, who have been the tools of the Emperor in their dealings with foreign Legations. The Korean Foreign Minister in 1905 was not an efficient and responsible representative of either the intentions or the transactions of his own government; instructions were frequently sent direct from the Palace to Ministers in other countries; foreign Legations had, each one, a separate cipher to be used for such communications; and there were several instances of clandestine communication with agents abroad, even during the Russo-Japanese war. To guard, therefore, against the repetition of occurrences similar to those which had already cost her so dearly, Japan's interests demanded that her control over the management of Korea's foreign affairs should be undivided and unquestioned.

It was not, however, in the interests of Japan alone that the management of Korea's foreign affairs was to pass out of her own hands. It was distinctly, as events are fast proving