Page:In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908).djvu/333

Rh measures necessary to achieve reform; that the foreign nations chiefly interested have definitively recognized the Japanese Protectorate; and that the leaders of the foreign moral and religious forces are so largely in harmony with the plans of Japan; now that all this is matter of past achievement, the prospects for the future of Korea are brighter than they have ever been before. One may reasonably hope that the time is not far distant when both rulers and people will be consciously the happier and more prosperous, because they have been compelled by a foreign and hated neighbor to submit to a reformation imposed from without. That they would ever have reformed themselves is not to be believed by those who know intimately the mental and moral history and characteristics of the Koreans.