THE ECONOMIC CONDITION OF COREA.
For nearly a quarter of a century Corea, the once hermit nation, has
been opened to intercourse with the world, and the student has had
facilities for understanding the country and people and realizing what
are the social and political problems of humanity in the peninsula.
As in most old Asiatic states, so in Corea, there is an almost total
absence of an intelligent middle class, which in the West is the
characteristic of progressive nations. In the Land of Morning Radiance
there is a governing minority consisting of about one-tenth of the
whole population. These, the Yangban (civil and military), living in
ancient privilege and prerogative and virtually paying no taxes or
tolls, prey upon the common people. The great bulk, that is,
nine-tenths of the population, is agricultural and is gathered in
hamlets and villages.
The typical Corean tills the soil, in which occupation, after ages of
unprogressive routine, he has come to his present mental status. There
is not even a distinct manufacturing class in Corea, for nearly all
industry is still in the cottage. The few articles needed by the
laborer for the floor, the wall, and the kitchen are made by the farmer
during his winter hours, and his women-folk weave and make up the
clothing. The average carpenter, blacksmith, and stone mason is simply
a laborer on the land with added skill in a special line. Even the
fisherman cultivates the soil. The village schoolmaster is a son of the
farmer of the better class. There are groups of
population-office-holders and their retainers and hangers-on,
shopkeepers and traders, butchers, porters, miners, junk-sailors, and
innkeepers, sorcerers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers, but, all told,
the number of men who do not live on the soil form but a decimal
fraction in the national household.
For these compelling reasons the problems of internal government relate
almost wholly to the woe or weal of the tillers of the soil. During the
summer of six months the average Corean stands bare-legged in the mud,
planting or cultivating grain. His wife and children, especially his
daughters, help him in the raising of rice, barley, wheat, and beans,
and in the harvesting and securing of the final products. During the
four cold months of the year he is at work gathering fuel or making
mats, sandals, screens, or thatch. During the first and seventh moons
he enjoys an easy time, doing little or nothing, and these two months
are like holiday. The average income of a Corean farmer is about thirty
dollars a year. The average house in Corea consists only of mud, straw,
twine, and wood, above a foundation of earth faced with stone and worth
but a few dollars. The price of waste land is from one to five dollars
an acre, and of cultivated fertile soil from ten to sixty dollars an
acre. The lots are poorly marked and boundary quarrels are incessant.
The Corean farmer knows little about scientific irrigation or variety
in fertilizers, dried grass being his chief manure. The mountains are
greatly denuded of their forests, and alternate droughts and floods
work awful disasters. With a naturally good soil and fine climate,
agriculture is yet in a backward condition. It is said that the
Japanese in the sixteenth century taught the Coreans the cultivation of
rice, millions of bushels of which, under stimulus from the same
source, they are now able to export annually. In recent years the
Japanese have attempted to secure control of the waste lands of Corea
so as to develop them, not only for the production of cereals,
vegetable wax, paper fibre, and stuff for weaving, but also for cotton
to supply the demands of the Osaka mills. Their demands, pressed too
severely in July, 1904, were the cause of vigorous native protest in
great public meetings.
The Corean rustic is, as a rule, illiterate. Probably only about four
out of ten males of the farming class can read either Chinese or
Corean, but counting in the women it is estimated that about
eighty-five per cent of the people can neither read nor write, though
the percentage varies greatly with the locality. As a general thing,
there is more acquaintance with books and writing in the southern than
in the northern provinces. It is pitiful to find in the Budget for 1904
that but $27,718 are appropriated for schools outside of Seoul, the
latter receiving $135,074, of which the sum of $44,220 goes to foreign
teachers in the English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese
language schools. Although since 1895 the old civil-service
examinations have been abolished and there has been a Department of
Education, it has thus far had little influence upon the country at
large. In the central office in 1904, out of $28,617 appropriated,
$19,857 went for salaries and office expenses, $6,500 being for
text-book printing.
The Corean farmer is simple in his dress, food, and habits. He does not
journey far from home. Although the high-roads are lively with
travellers, one sees not the farmer but the literati, the traders, and
the porters. Few country folks ever visit the large cities, and in
regions near the capital few have seen Seoul. Custom is the eternal law
to the rustic, who is patient, bearing extortion until flesh and blood
can stand it no longer, when he rises in revolt against his oppressor.
Yet it is against the bad man, not the system itself, that he protests.
After the obnoxious officer has been recalled or driven away and
temporary relief is obtained, the Corean farmer settles down into a
good tax-paying subject as of yore, and unless something like the Tong
Hak movement stirs him, his wheel of life quickly slips again into the
rut of routine. As long as he can get enough to eat he is content. When
oppression and robbery are joined to Nature’s niggardliness, he and his
comrades are transformed into a howling mob of starving malcontents,
ready for bloody vengeance.
The son of the soil is superstitious to the last degree. He lives in
constant terror of the demons and spirits that overpopulate earth, air,
and water, for he is without the protection that the certainties of
science or the strength of pure religion furnishes. No unifying,
uplifting, and inspiring knowledge of one God is his. His thatched hut
or mud-floored hovel is a museum of fetiches. Often he will give the
best fruits of the fields to what seems to an alien a mass of straw or
rags. The sorceress thrives like a fat parasite on the farmer, getting
well paid for her songs, dances, incantations, and presence at the
feasts. Yet the Corean enjoys the religious festivals. He is at least
just to himself, while professing generosity to the spirits. He honors
the gods but ultimately puts the well-cooked offerings far from
them—even into his own interior; for above all things, the worshipper
is orthodox in his belief in a well-filled stomach.
With such a people, both Confucianism and Buddhism become the grossest
of superstitions. The Corean’s face is toward the past. He invokes and
worships the dead, and to him the graveyard contains more than the
future can bring him. Besides the extortions of the nobles, officials,
and other parasitic or predatory classes, the expense of offerings to
his dead ancestors amounts to many millions of dollars a year, far
exceeding in their total the national revenue. In Seoul alone there are
three thousand sorceresses, each earning at least $7.50 a month. The
farmer is poor, but he is hospitable and liberal. He has untold
reverence for learning and for rank, he loves flowers and beautiful
scenery, but he is stupid in the presence of an innovation. His area of
vision is bounded by the hills within the circle of which he was born.
His chief recreation is in going to market, for, generally speaking,
there are few shops in the peninsula, but there is a market every five
or six days, where the natives exchange their products and their
opinions. According to the state of weather conditions, the native is
happy or suffers, a large harvest making all smile, a scant crop
causing famine and hunger and the outbreak of banditti and rapine.
Besides buying and selling, huckstering and gossiping, there are at the
markets plenty of fighting and drunkenness as diversions. Going out for
wool the farmer frequently comes home shorn, but he has had his fun, or
rather a variation of deadly monotony. Furthermore, he is fond of a
joke and loves to chaff his fellows.
As the country itself is governed out of the graveyard, and sovereign,
court, and people are driven by imaginary demons and spirits, so the
farmers, both as individuals, as families, and as clans, guard
jealously and in fear the ancestral mounds with superstitious
reverence. Hence one large element of village excitement is in
quarrelling and fighting over graves. About fifty per cent of the cases
brought before the country magistrates are said to be connected with
these grave fights. These bitter struggles involve whole clans and
result in bloodshed and loss of life. Even the dead are not allowed to
rest in peace. The digging up of corpses and the tumbling of them
beyond the limits in dispute is a common occurrence. This ghoulish
activity is varied by an occasional abduction of widows or by other
infractions of the law. Another large element of anxiety to the farmer
is the protection of the water supply for his rice-swamp. The damming
of the stream above or the draining off of the water below may ruin his
crop. The breaking of the mud boundaries, and the stealing of water
from a neighbor’s field is mirrored in proverbs and folk-lore. It is
sufficiently habitual to furnish a plentiful supply of pretexts for
quarrels and fighting.
There are four classes of agriculturists. The lowest tiller of the soil
is a serf, owning no land, working by the day or contract, and
virtually bound to the glebe. The men of the next class, though owning
no lands, work the farms of others on shares. These farm-hands and
farm-tenants make up the great mass of the Corean people. They live in
thatched mud huts, with enough plain food to keep them alive and often
fat, but with scanty change of garments and few or no comforts of life.
They are occupied during the working months from daybreak to twilight
in unremitting toil. The third class consists of the small owners with
possessions worth from five hundred to five thousand dollars and
numbering three per cent of the farming population. In the fourth or
highest class are the landed proprietors, the aristocracy of the land,
the richest member being worth as much as four or five million dollars,
with an annual income of at least a quarter of a million. Insignificant
in numbers, they are mighty in power, for it is these great landowners
who rule the realm, and most of them live in Seoul.
To the great mass of the people in Corea there is no motive for much
industry beyond danger of starvation, and but little incentive to
enterprise. Under old normal conditions now being slowly ameliorated,
the official, the yangban, and the landed aristocracy, in a word, the
predatory classes, seize upon the common man’s earnings and
accumulations, so that it seems to him useless and even foolish to work
for more than enough to support life, while as for the “civilization
nonsense,” does it not mean more taxation? On the 13th of November,
1902, the announcement was made of the increase in land tax from $10
per measure of ground to $16 per measure. So argues the average man in
Corea, the land long ruled by real oppressors and imaginary demons.
The researches of scholars have also revealed the actual economic
conditions of the nation in the days of hermitage. Old Corea was not,
as in feudal Japan, straitened in its production of food. In the island
empire only about one-twelfth of the soil was or could be cultivated.
Hence Japan was rigidly limited in her food-producing area, so that the
population, besides being kept down through such natural checks as
famine, pestilence, storm and flood, was further diminished to fit the
food supply by such artificial means as sumptuary laws, licensed
prostitution, infanticide, cruel punishments, and frequent
decapitation. In Corea, also, where the fertile earth, though formed to
be inhabited and abundant in area of plain and valley, was neither
properly replenished nor subdued, many checks upon population existed.
Local famines were frequent and often long continued, and neither
religion nor the means of transportation furnished the means of saving
life to any large amount. Artificial checks on too rapid multiplication
of humanity operated powerfully. The lesser care and kindness given to
female children resulted in a heavy death-rate as compared with that of
the boys, the cruel punishments and frequent torture and decapitation
and the lack of incentive to industry all wrought together to make both
the land and the human life on it of comparatively slight value.
The whole situation was changed when Corea ceased to be a hermit land
and began to be fertilized by foreign commerce and ideas. Confronted by
new methods of trade, science, and religion, the thinking native was
summoned to thought and action. Into the Corean mind, long held in
bondage by Confucianism, which degrades woman and narrows man’s
intellect, the universal religion entered to compel the Corean man to
think of other lands and people besides his own, to search his own
heart, to attempt to make himself and his neighbors better, and to take
a new outlook on the universe. The new doctrines delivered believers
from the paralyzing thrall of demons and evil spirits, from ancestor
worship, and from the sceptre held by the hand rising out of the grave.
Into the Corea clamped as in iron bands by false economic notions
entered the spirit of free competition. Into a land that knew no such
thing as a foreign market the railway brings an eager purchaser to the
farmer’s door, and by carrying his goods to the seaports it enables him
to give to and receive manifold benefits from the world at large.
Already, through the energy of the canny islanders from the east, the
crops in Corea have quadrupled, though under native mismanagement this
does not necessarily mean immediate benefit to the man on the soil, but
rather to the official class, or to the landholder in the capital. It
has been computed that the production of sixty million bushels of grain
have thus been developed in Corea through the Japanese demand. Between
the feverish enterprise of the Japanese on the one side and the
tireless thrift of the Chinese on the other, “the good old days” of
primitive routine are gone forever. Corea has 4,500,000 acres under
cultivation, or about eight and a half per cent of her 82,000 square
miles of area, so that 3,500,000 available acres await the plough. From
her arable soil six millions more of population might easily find
subsistence, and nearly ten millions of dollars of crops could be
raised. The peninsula needs in every great valley the railway, which
“quadruples the value of every foot of land within twenty miles of its
line.” The line from Fusan to Seoul has already raised the value of
town property in elect places hundreds of per cent and measurably all
along between the terminals. This railway was begun in August, 1901,
but though the work slackened for lack of capital, by December 1, 1903,
thirty-one miles at either end had been built. The outbreak of the war
with Russia revealed its military value and promise was at once given
that by Japanese Government aid it would be completed with its
thirty-one tunnels and 20,500 feet of bridges by the end of 1904. This
Fusan-Seoul railway, 287 miles long, will traverse four provinces in
the richest part of Corea, wherein are seven-tenths of all the houses
and five-sevenths of all the cultivated area in the empire. Here also
are the sites of the great fairs held six times monthly, the
thirty-nine stations of the road being located at or near these places
of trade, the total business of which amounts to over sixty-five per
cent of the internal trade of the empire.
The Corean social and political system, sufficiently weak in hermit
days, has shown itself unable to withstand the repeated shock of attack
by eager and covetous foreigners, nor will it ever be able, even in a
measure, to defend itself against the fierce and unrelenting greed of
the strong nations intrenched upon its soil, except by complete
reorganization. Both the outward forms and the inward spirit must
change if the Coreans are to preserve their national identity. The
nation has been the bone of contention between jealous and greedy
rivals. One foreign government by crafty diplomacy secures the right of
cutting timber valued at millions of dollars, another gets mining
concessions, others propose this or that industry or supposed line of
production which depleted the treasury. The impoverished kingdom has
not only wasted many millions of treasure in foolish enterprises, but
is deprived of its natural assets in timber, metals, fisheries, and
industries.
The problem of bringing Corea into harmony with her modern environment
is only in some features like that of Japan, for there have been
wanting in the peninsula what was so effective in Japan’s case. In the
island empire, the long previous preparation by means of the
infiltration of Western ideas during two centuries of communication
with Europe through the Dutch merchants, the researches of her own
scholars furnishing inspiration from their national history, the
exercise during many generations of true patriotism and self-sacrifice
for the public good prepared the island nation to cope with new
conditions and situations. In the clash with the West, Japan came out
victor. Corea has no samurai. She lacks what Japan has always had—a
cultured body of men, superbly trained in both mind and body, the
soldier and scholar in one, who held to a high ideal of loyalty,
patriotism, and sacrifice for country. The island samurai enjoying the
same prerogative and privilege as the Corean yangban (civil and
military) not only abolished feudalism, but after giving up their
hereditary pensions and privileges, joined the productive classes,
while at the same time the Japanese merchants and mechanics were raised
in the social scale, the pariahs given citizenship, and then all lines
of promotion opened to all in the army, navy, schools, courts, and
civil service. The fertilizing streams of foreign commerce, the
inspiration that comes from brotherhood with other nations, and above
all, the power brought to Nippon through the noble labors and object
lessons of the Christian missionaries, enabled the Japanese to take
equal place in the world with the nations of the West. Corea, on the
contrary, by still allowing the existence of predatory classes—nobles,
officials, and great landowners—by denying her people education, by
being given to superstition from palace to hut and from sovereign to
serf, remains still in weakness and poverty. What Corea above all
needs, is that the lazy yangban cut their long finger-nails and get to
work.
Yet dark as is the situation, it is not without hope. Slowly and
painfully the Coreans are learning that no nation is born in a day.
Under the training of Christian teachers, a generation with new motives
to action and new mental horizons, and fed with food to sustain the
spirit, is coming on. Christianity is, with a remnant at least, making
headway against the vices so common to this mild-mannered nation—skill
in lying, stealing, gambling, drunkenness, and the social evil.
For ages and until Japan humbled China in 1894, Corea was so thoroughly
and in all things the vassal and pupil of the Middle Kingdom, from
which most of the elements of her civilization had been borrowed, that
in the tributary kingdom there could be no patriotism in its highest
sense, nor could political parties and cliques have any reason for
existence except as they were concerned with aims that ended in
selfishness. With the people in general, there was only anxiety to pay
taxes, win the favor of the local magistrate, and escape the clutches
of the law. With masters and rulers, there was ever pitiful fear of the
great country China, and, under Confucianism, a desire to keep things
as they were, mixed with impotent dread of change. Of pure love of
country, of willingness to make sacrifices for their native land—that
is almost a new thought as yet nourished by a few far-seeing patriots.
In the evolution of the Corean, social and psychic, his present ethical
stage is not beyond that of the group, clan, or neighborhood. It has
not yet reached the individual. The majority of the people have that
kind of patriotism which means the instinctive desire to preserve
national identity. The one thing which they now fear, being in the
vortex of the great storm of war and in the centre of the economic
typhoon of the twentieth century, is national extinction. Even to-day
the Coreans feel that they would rather live without the new things of
civilization, such as railways, education, public hygiene, or even of
righteous government, than be subject to an alien Power. History to the
peninsular gives no uncertain sound as to what foreign intervention has
always meant, that is, more oppression and even rapine. Seeing what has
happened in half a lifetime, through the coming of the alien to Corea,
the native does not want civilization at the hands of foreigners,
though it may be that he will have to take it. Possibly through
education and a new outlook upon the universe he will be glad to get
it, even struggling for it until by assimilation it becomes his own. In
ancient history and the old days of the separation of nations, there
were many civilizations and varying standards. In these latter days of
the world’s brotherhood there is but one standard of civilization, and
but one body of international law, which all must obey. The nation or
kingdom that will not serve and obey this standard will pass out of
history and perish. The signs that Corea realizes this truth and that
her best men are seeking fraternity with their fellows for help and
uplift are not wanting. Naturally they turn to the great republic,
which since its beginning has steadfastly followed the policy of
healing, helping, teaching, and uplifting the Asiatic nations.
Corea sent a delegate to the International Postal Union, which met in
Washington, and in 1896 a postal system with stamps of four kinds was
established, and under French auspices has been working in excellent
condition. The stamps, as well as the national flag and documents,
coins and other expressions of what is essentially representative of
the Coreans as a nation, illustrate their repertoire of symbolism. The
flag in blue, red, black, and white contains the two great emblems of
the primitive Chinese philosophy and theory of the universe. Through
these, the Corean sees all things visible and invisible produced as the
results of their endless working and counteraction in combination and
dissolution. The forces of heaven and earth, light and darkness, the
positive and the negative, the male and the female, the in and the yo,
are represented as two germs or commas in constant embrace or movement.
This figure occupies the centre of the field and in each corner are the
broken lines of the Pal Kwai, or eight diagrams of primitive Chinese
tradition concerning the origin of language and writing. On the stamps
we read the Chinese characters Tai han and Corea. Like China, old
Japan, Russia, Turkey and other church nations, which unite more or
less closely Church and State and are governed, in spite of all outward
development and manifestations, by primitive or mediæval notions, Corea
is a “Tei Koku,” or “divinely governed” realm, and so makes profession
in Chinese characters, as does even modern Japan, though furnished with
a Constitution and Diet. Besides these Chinese ideographs, we read in
English, “Imperial Corean Post,” and in the en-mun or native script, a
sentence to the same effect. The national flower is the plum blossom,
and is figured with its leaves on either side of the stem. The value or
denomination of the stamp is given below both in English with Roman
letters, and in Corean or en-mun. The date-mark made by the ink-stamp
shows in the French spelling of the name of the country and capital the
international character of the postal system. The national colors, as
judged by the hangings in the royal palace, are yellow, red, and green.
Imitating other things imperial in adjoining or Western nations, the
Government at Seoul established a Bureau of Decorations. These baubles,
being liberally distributed, have helped handsomely to deplete the
treasury of the little empire, most of whose people live in a state of
semi-starvation or righteous discontent. The Emperor himself and his
generals and ministers have had their breasts liberally adorned with
various marks of the regard of the rulers of Japan, Great Britain,
Russia, France, and Belgium, while between August 5, 1900, and December
20, 1902, the Corean Government had bestowed forty-two decorations,
requiring a liberal outlay of bullion and artistic workmanship. To the
Emperor of Japan, Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, the Kaiser of the
German Empire, the President of the French Republic, the King of Italy,
the King of the Belgians, the Emperor of Austria, and the Crown Prince
of Japan, the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure was awarded. This
contains the emblem in the centre of the flag. No Americans have been
thus officially adorned, but the Great Decoration of the Golden Measure
was offered to President McKinley, only to be declined; he having,
happily for the American people, nothing to offer in return. The Great
Decoration of the Plum Blossom has been given to Prince Kwacho of Japan
and the Russian Prince Cyril, while the other decorations, containing
the Pal Kwai of the eight mystic diagrams and the plum blossom or the
national flower, in several grades or classes, have been offered to
various servants or guests of the Government. Along with this
brilliancy on foreign coat breasts, it is suggestive to read in the
imperial budget for 1904 that of $19,560 appropriated to the bureau of
decorations, the amount expended on bullion, medals, etc., was $7,431,
and for salaries $10,130. Another interesting item, illuminating
economic methods in Seoul, is that of $10,453 appropriated for the
Mining Bureau. Of this amount the sum of $8,173 was spent for salaries
and travelling, all the rest, except one item marked “miscellaneous
$744,” being for office expenses. In the Ceremonial Bureau $19,000 were
used on salaries and office expenses out of a total of $21,508. Similar
titbits of economic information are frequent under the heads of the
Board of Generals (who supervise an army supposed to be five thousand
strong) and that of Imperial Sacrifices, and others, explain very
clearly the condition of a country in which there is no clear line of
demarcation between the palace and the Government or administration,
while eloquent in suggestions as to the reason why the larger part of
Corea remains in a state of more or less chronic insurrection.
The budget for 1904 shows a total revenue of $14,214,573 made up of the
following items: land tax, $9,703,591; house tax, $460,295; taxes on
salt, fish, etc., $210,000; poll tax, $850,000; miscellaneous taxes,
$200,000; arrears from 1903, $2,790,687.
The items of disbursement are as follows: Imperial privy purse,
$1,013,359; imperial sacrifices, $186,641; household department,
$327,541; war department, $5,180,614; finance department, $42,741,999;
communications, $637,648; incidentals and extras, $1,843,503. Other
items, of which the police bureau, $406,925, and the foreign
department, $287,367, and educational, $205,673, are the more
important, are pension bureau, board of generals, the cabinet
government records, bureau of decorations, law department, department
of agriculture, privy council, and special palace guard. It is pleasant
to note that there is a surplus of $275, but the amount given for
education and expended under the head of agriculture seems pitiful. The
large items of the budget deal almost wholly with the salaries of
native officials. One interesting and redeeming item among the “extras”
is that “for helping shipwrecked men, $5,000.”
The greatest immediate need of Corea is a uniform and stable currency.
Added to ancient evils was the action of Japan in adopting the gold
standard in 1899, which threw all things commercial in Corea into dire
confusion. On the 15th of December, 1901, the coinage law was
published, by which Corea adopted the gold standard; but this law was
never put into effect. The Japanese have frequently endeavored by
various means to secure a standard currency.
Under the stimulus and pressure of foreign trade, Corea has now at
least nine ports open to the residence and business of foreigners
besides the three or four inland places of traffic. Wonsan (Gensan),
Fusan, and Chemulpo were opened by the treaties of 1876 and 1882, and
have thriving settlements. The ginseng crop exported from these places
is usually bought by Japanese, whose usual practice is that, for
example, of May, 1902, when of the fifty thousand catties, ten thousand
catties were burnt at Chemulpo, in order to keep up the price. On the
1st of October, 1898, Chinnampo and Mokpo were added to the list of
open ports. The former lies on the northern shore of Ping-an inlet,
twenty miles from the sea and forty miles from Ping-an city. It is now
a thriving town with well laid-out streets. As the river leading to
Ping-an is for ten miles or so below the city not navigable even by
very small sea-going steamers, it can never be “a port” in the ordinary
sense, but the returns of its trade are tabulated with those of
Chinnampo, its outlet. Wiju (Ai-chiu) and Anju are almost the only
other ports of value in the province of Ping-an. Anju is the landing
stage of the American Mining Company for its mining materials and
explosives.
Yongampo is in north latitude 38° 52′ and east longitude 126° 04′. When
it was opened in 1898, Russians and Japanese took up land so eagerly
that a collision seemed imminent. Later it came very near being made a
Russian fortress as “Port Nicholas.” Mokpo, in the southwestern part of
Chullado, is the natural maritime outlet of “the Garden of Corea.” Soon
after it was made port of entry and trade, the wisdom shown in its
selection was justified, for its growth has been healthy and rapid.
From this point, in the autumn of 1902, a Boston gentleman went into
the interior for a hunting trip of two months, during which time he
killed three large tigers, besides deer and wild boar.
On May 1, 1899, Kunsan, Masampo, and Songchin were thrown open to
foreign trade and residence. Kunsan is on the west coast, and like
Mokpo, long famous for its abundant export of rice paid as revenue. It
lies at the mouth of the river dividing the two rich and warm provinces
of Chulla and Chung Chong, about half-way between Chemulpo and Mokpo,
whence the rice, wheat, beans, hides, grasscloth, paper, manufactured
articles in bamboo, fans, screens, mats, and marine products of many
kinds are exported. Masampo, a few miles to the southwest of Fusan, in
north latitude 35° 09′ and east longitude 128° 40′, has one of the
finest harbors in the world, which, when well fortified, might command
the entrance to the Sea of Japan. In the negotiations between Japan and
Russia, in 1903, this spot was jealously coveted by both Powers as the
prize of the future, as the party possessing it might make it a
Dardanelles, closing the sea between the island empire and the
continent and making this body of water a Euxine. Russia tried to bind
Japan not to fortify this or any other place on the east coast of
Corea. Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and Coreans soon flocked to this
favored port and have made business lively. Songchin, once the seat of
an old stronghold, in the large northeastern province of Ham Kiung,
bordering on Russia, which has no long navigable rivers, as in the
south, lies about 120 miles from Wonsan and sends most of its products
thither. It has a poor harbor in a foggy region, but fertile soil, fat
cattle, and mineral riches are within reach. The Customs Reports for
1903 show a growing trade of $328,891. Eleven other landing stages
bring up the total value of trade in Ham Kiung province to $1,676,714.
In 1902 the total imports were nearly balanced by the exports from all
Corea. Cotton is becoming an important item of sale abroad. Gold in
1902 was exported to the amount of $2,532,053. The total value of
foreign trade has doubled during the past decade. So far the steamer
tonnage is, like the general foreign trade, over three-fourths
Japanese. Most emphatically and luminously does the modern economic as
well as political history of the peninsula prove that the best
interests of Japan and Corea are closely interwoven. Mutual benefit
follows unity and friendship, reciprocal injury results from
estrangement.
All these open ports are the gateways of a commerce that must steadily
and healthfully increase, and which under stable and just government
would rapidly enlarge. So long as there is uncertainty as to the
political status of the Land of Morning Calm, the chief importance of
the maritime gateways into the country will be strategic and military,
rather than commercial. A permanent settlement of the political
question, in debate ever since the modern renascence of Japan, ought to
act on the development of the natural resources of Corea as the warm
spring rains act upon soil long chilled and fallow under winter’s
frost. Few regions, whether we consider its geographical location for
commerce, the fertility of its soil, its animal wealth, the richness of
its mineral deposits, or the abundance of its treasures in the sea, are
more highly favored than Corea. When man, society, and government in
the peninsula answer Nature’s challenge and match the opportunity, the
world will find that history’s storehouse of surprises has not been
empty. Toward the development of the kind of man needed, the Christian
missionaries are, above all other teachers and forces, working, and
with every sign of promise.