Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/29

 shrines have been swept away, where schools and churches have been built, and where the transforming power of Christianity has done a fundamental work without touching a single one of the time-honoured customs of the land; where hard-handed farmers have begun in the only genuine way to develop the culture of the West. That culture evinces itself in its ultimate forms of honesty, sympathy, unselfishness, and not in the use of a swallow-tail coat and a silk hat. Which, think you, is the proper way to go about the rehabilitation of the East? The only yellow peril possible lies in the arming of the Orient with the thunder-bolts of the West, without at the same time giving her the moral forces which will restrain her in their use.

The American public has been persistently told that the Korean people are a degenerate and contemptible nation, incapable of better things, intellectually inferior, and better off under Japanese rule than independent. The following pages may in some measure answer these charges, which have been put forth for a specific purpose,—a purpose that came to full fruition on the night of November 17, 1905, when, at the point of the sword, Korea was forced to acquiesce "voluntarily" in the virtual destruction of her independence once for all. The reader will here find a narrative of the course of events which led up to this crisis, and the part that different powers, including the United States, played in the tragedy.