Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/94

 64 THE PASSING OF KOREA advisable to banish them first, and then send and have them executed at their place of banishment. It gives less occasion for trouble at the capital. Every King who has been deposed has been so treated.

The other forms of punishment in vogue are imprisonment, beating and impressment into the chain-gang. Men that are slightly suspected of seditious ideas are kept under lock and key, so that they may not have an opportunity to spread their dangerous notions. Nothing can be proved against them, and they are simply held in detention, awaiting a promised trial which in many cases never comes off. One man has lately been released from prison who remained a guest of the government in this way for six or seven years without trial. He was suspected of too liberal ideas.

The prisons, whether of the capital or the provinces, are mere shelters with earth floors and without fires. Food is supplied by the friends of the victim, or he will probably die of starvation.

Every time the thermometer goes down below zero in the winter we hear of a certain number of cases of death from freezing in the prisons. But the sanitary arrangements are such that it remains a moot question whether the freezing cold of winter is not preferable to the heats of summer.

The most degrading form of punishment is that of the chain-gang; for here the offender is constantly being driven about the streets in a dull blue uniform, chained about the neck to three or four other unfortunates, and ever subject to the scorn of the public eye. It can be imagined with what feelings a proud man who has been accustomed to lord it over his fellows will pass through the streets in this guise. These slaves are put to all sorts of dirty work, and their emaciated and anaemic countenances peer out from under their broad straw hats with an insolence born of complete loss of self-respect.

The penal code is filled with directions for administering beatings. The number of blows is regulated by law, but it hardly need be said that the limitation of the punishment to the legal