Page:In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908).djvu/313

Rh to find within himself whatever is necessary to understand and interpret this unity, and especially for the observer who does not care even to detect and recognize the existence of such a unity, the difference between Orient and Occident is a puzzle—perpetually baffling and seemingly insoluble.

Now in some not wholly unimportant aspects of Korean character and Korean civilization, these difficulties exist in an exaggerated form. Korea is old in its enforced ignorance, sloth, and corruption; but Korea is new to rawness, in its response to the stimulus of foreign and Western ideas, and in its exposure to the observation, either careless and casual or patient and studious, of visitors and residents from abroad. Korea has not yet been awakened to any definite form of intelligent, national self-consciousness. At the same time, neither its material resources, nor its physical character- istics, nor its history and antiquities, nor its educational possibilities, nor the distinctive spirit of its people, have ever been at all thoroughly investigated by others. No wonder, then, that the views expressed by the "oldest residents" in Korea regarding the characteristics of its rulers and its people—Emperor, late Queen, Yang-bans, pedlers, and peasants (for there is almost no middle class)—are strangely conflicting. Diverse and even contradictory traits of character are, with equal confidence and on the basis of an equally long and intimate acquaintance, ascribed by different persons to all these classes.

The true and satisfactory account of these differences of opinion is not, however, to be found by wholly denying the justness of either of the opposite points of view. Contradic- tions are inherent in that very type of character of which the Koreans afford so many striking examples. Indeed, all peoples, when at a certain stage of race-culture, and the multitudes in all civilizations, are just that bundles of confused and conflicting ideas, impulses, and practices, which have never