Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/110

 poured into the peninsula and were eagerly adopted by the people, and they caused a very rapid advance in what we call enlightenment. There can be no question as to the great debt which Korea owes to China, but, on the other hand, this was not accomplished without causing a certain amount of harm to the Korean people. They were still in a formative period. They were just beginning to feel their own powers, and at this very moment they were flooded with the finished products of an older civilisation, which took away all incentive for personal effort. The genius of the people was smothered at the start, and never have they recovered from the intellectual stagnation which resulted from the overloading of their minds with Chinese ideals. And this was the more to be regretted, because these Chinese ideals were by no means fitted to the Korean temperament. Ever since that day the Koreans have been existing in spite of, rather than because of, that remarkable invasion of Chinese civilisation. Look, for instance, at the language. Korean is utterly different from the Chinese. It is a highly articulated language, and requires a very nice adjustment of its grammatical machinery to work smoothly; but the clumsy Chinese ideograph came in and prevented the working out of a phonetic system of writing, which would surely have come. The Korean people have made three distinct protests against the imposition of the Chinese character upon them : once, soon after its introduction, when a great scholar, Sulchong, was moved to make a sort of diacritical system, whereby the Chinese text could be rendered intelligible to the Korean; again, in the latter days of the Koryu dynasty; and again, in the early days of the present dynasty, when the native alphabet was evolved. In spite of all that China did for Korea by way of introducing the products of civilisation, it would have been far better for Korea to have gained these or similar things gradually, by working them out in her own way, thereby exercising her own mental powers and gaining something better even than the material benefits of civilisation.

But it was not to be. Chinese law, religion, dress, art, litera