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298 without. By cheating and chicanery, they relieved the Imperial treasury of its funds, and in their eagerness to fill their pockets never stopped to think of what dangerous seeds of disorder and rapine they were scattering broadcast over the benighted peninsula."

It must doubtless be confessed that under the ex-Emperor the efforts of the Residency-General to effect the needed reforms were successful only to a limited extent. But with his last piece of intriguing to "relieve the Imperial treasury of its funds, "by sending a commission to the Hague Conference," in co-operation with native and foreign schemers," the old era came quickly to an end. The history of its termination will be told elsewhere; but the fact has illumined and strengthened the hope that Korea, too, can in time produce men fit to rule with some semblance of honesty, fidelity, and righteousness. Meantime, they must be largely ruled from without.

How this hope of industrial and political redemption may be extended to the people at large and applied to the different important interests of the nation, both in its internal and foreign relations, will be illustrated in the several following chapters. Now that the Emperor is publicly committed to an extended policy of reform; that the Ministers are for the first time in the history of Korea really a Cabinet exercising some control; that the Resident-General has the right and the duty to guide and to enforce all the important