CHAPTER XI.

“For the touch of a vanished handAnd the sound of a voice that is still,”

“For the touch of a vanished hand

And the sound of a voice that is still,”

shall blame the Koreans for their incessant, their blind, filial devotion?

CHAPTER XI.

KOREA’S HISTORY IN A NUTSHELL.

In the tenth century Korea assumed its present boundaries, and for nine hundred years it has remained unchanged in its coast line, and its northern limits. Except on the north, Korea is surrounded by the sea, and its northern boundary is marked by the Yalu and the Tiumen rivers, that almost meet at two of their sources. For convenience in the recapitulation of Korea’s history—a recapitulation in which everything else must be sacrificed to brevity—the history of the peninsula may be divided into three periods: First, the period antecedent to the final settlement of Korea’s boundaries—a period whose history is in part at least, conjectural; second, a period reaching from then until modern times; and third, a period covering Korea’s recent history, and the comparative opening up of Korea to foreign travellers, and to foreign influence. We know as much and as little of Korea’s remotest ancestry as we do of the ancestries of other countries. The Korean family can trace its pedigree a long way, but at length the pedigree becomes lost in the mists of remote history and of prehistoric times, and we can form no conclusive opinion as to who were the first founders of the race.

Korean civilization came chiefly from China, and the Koreans themselves from the highlands of Manchuria and the Amoor valley.

The kingdom of Korea, and indeed the nation of Korea, was founded by an ancestor of Confucius. In Latin his name is Kicius, in Japanese it is Ki-shi, and in Chinese Ki-tsze, which means Viscount of Ki. He was a faithful vassal of the Chow dynasty of old China, and when the Chows were overthrown in 1122B.C.he refused to acknowledge the new power, and fled with, some say five some say ten thousand followers to the north-east. Here he founded a kingdom which he called Chosön, and of which he made himself king. He was welcomed by the people already living there, and these aborigines and the followers of Ki-tsze are among the remotest ancestors to which Koreans can prove their claim. Ki-tsze introduced into his kingdom the study and the practice of medicine, agriculture, literature, the fine arts, and a dozen other industries in which China was then most proficient. He founded his kingdom on the lines of Chinese feudalism, and very much as he founded it the kingdom endured until the beginning of the Christian era, and the Koreans to-day call Ki-tsze the father of Chosön, and because of him, and the quality of his kingdom, claim that their civilization is almost as ancient as the civilization of China, and older than the civilization of Chaldea.

Just where this first kingdom of Chosön was nobody knows. Some authorities believe that it lay exactly north-west of the Yalu river, just beyond the present borders of Korea, and in the present Chinese province of Shing-king. It seems more probable that the first Chosön was in the valley of the Sungari river, and some historians, with considerable show of reason, locate it still further north, in the valley of the Amoor. Certainly its borders shrank and extended almost continually, and its entire position seems to have been more or less changed at several times, and only for a few years was any part of the Korea we know included within its area. At one time old Chosön certainly was located north-east of Pekin. It became part of China, politically and geographically, in the first century.

In the territory taken from the kings of old Chosön, and annexed to China, lay the kingdom of Kokorai. It lay east; as the old Chinese historians state, directly east, and slightly north of modern Mukden, and between the sources of the Yalu and the Sungari rivers. The people of Kokorai were warlike and able. They seem to have been rather independent of China as early as 9A.D.; to have begun in 70A.D.a struggle with China, which lasted until the seventh century. During this long warfare—a warfare in which their country was repeatedly invaded by the Chinese—these warlike people, instead of being conquered or exterminated by China, flourished and increased until they had overrun the peninsula of the present Korea as far as the Han river.

This, then, is the outline of the history of the western and the northern parts of modern Korea, but before turning to the history of southern and eastern Korea, it will be interesting to glance a little more particularly at the history of Kokorai.

Well, north of Kokorai, north of the Sungari river, there existed in very ancient times (if we may trust Chinese tradition) a little kingdom called To-li or Ko-rai. While one of the early kings of To-li was out hunting, a favourite waiting-maid “saw, floating in the atmosphere, a glistening vapour which entered her bosom. This ray or tiny cloud seemed to be about as big as an egg. Under its influence she conceived.

“The king, on his return, discovered her condition, and made up his mind to put her to death. Upon her explanation, however, he agreed to spare her life, but at once lodged her in prison.

“The child that was born proved to be a boy, which the king promptly cast among the pigs. But the swine breathed into his nostrils and the baby lived. He was next put among the horses, but they also nourished him with their breath, and he lived. Struck by this evident will of Heaven, that the child should live, the king listened to its mother’s prayers, and permitted her to nourish and train him in the palace. He grew up to be a fair youth, full of energy, and skilful in archery. He was named ‘Light of the East,’ and the king appointed him master of his stables.

“One day, while out hunting, the king permitted him to give an exhibition of his skill. This he did, drawing bow with such unerring aim that the royal jealousy was kindled, and he thought of nothing but how to compass the destruction of the youth. Knowing that he would be killed if he remained in the royal service, the young archer fled the kingdom. He directed his course to the south-east, and came to the borders of a vast and impassable river, most probably the Sungari. Knowing his pursuers were not far behind him, he cried out, in a great strait,⁠—

“ ‘Alas! shall I, who am the child of the Sun, and the grandson of the Yellow River, be stopped here powerless by this stream?’

“So saying, he shot his arrows at the water.

“Immediately all the fishes of the river assembled together in a thick shoal, making so dense a mass that their bodies became a floating bridge. On this the young prince (and according to the Japanese version of the legend, three others with him) crossed the stream and safely reached the further side. No sooner did he set foot on land than his pursuers appeared on the opposite shore, when the bridge of fishes at once dissolved. His three companions stood ready to act as his guides. One of the three was dressed in a costume made of seaweeds, a second in hempen garments, and a third in embroidered robes. Arriving at their city, he became the king of the tribe and kingdom of Fuyu, which lay in the fertile and well-watered region between the Sungari River and the Shan Alyn, or Ever-White Mountains. It extended several hundred miles east and west of a line drawn southward through Kirin, the larger half lying on the west.”

Certainly as early as 25B.C.To-li had attained very considerable civilization. Millet, sorghum, rice, beans, and wheat grew in abundance, and were carefully cultivated. Spirits were distilled from rice and grain, as they still are in Korea, Japan, and China. The people ate from bowls and with chop-sticks, as the people of modern China eat. The men were strong, well-built, and fearless. They were skilled in the manufacture and the use of swords, and lances, and bows and arrows. They were expert horsemen; were fond of dancing and music; decked themselves with pearls, and with gems of red jade. They had an elaborate system of etiquette which was rigidly observed. They had granaries, and well-built houses of wood, and their cities were surrounded by walls or palisades of stakes. They had a well-developed and a civilized religion, freer from superstition and from superstitious rites than many of the religions of modern Asia. They had a king, a well-defined feudal system, farms and farmers, nobility and serfs. They had prisons, and their system of justice was rigid. All this is surprising, for at that time the people by whom they were surrounded were barbarians, without literature, without form of government, in brief, without civilization. And yet these people of Fuyu, who were then far beyond the reach of Chinese influence, were in the full enjoyment of a civilization which was apparently of some maturity. From this many historians have inferred that the old kingdom of Fuyu was the exact site of the kingdom of Ki-tsze. This may have been. At all events, the people of Fuyu or their descendants peopled the kingdom of Kokorai, whose people in their turn populated the northern and the western parts of modern Korea.

Undoubtedly, the peoples of old Ko-rai and of Fuyu were the ancestors of the Koreans of our time. Very probably they were also the ancestors of the modern Japanese.

We know little or nothing, and we seem unlikely ever to learn much more about the early settlers of southern and eastern Korea.

Some time before the beginning of the Christian era Chinese authorities mention three independent kingdoms or nations that lay upon the shores of the Japan Sea, and south of the Han River. Early in the sixth century they had become very considerably civilized. Their literature, their art, their forms of government, and their social customs they had adopted from the Chinese. They were Buddhists; and Buddhism was then in its flower, sound in itself, and comparatively pure, and a powerful force for good and for culture. These three states were Pe-tsi (called by the Japanese historians Hiaksi), which was in the west; Sin-lo (called by the Japanese Shin-ra), which was in the south-east; and in the north, Ko-rai. They banded themselves together to attack or to repel the attacks of China and Japan. When this was unnecessary they fought each other. They fought steadily until the tenth century. Their appetite for warfare seemed insatiable, and when they could not fight among themselves they sought foes in China and Japan, and when they could not fight the Chinese or the Japanese they picked quarrelsome wars with each other. But this period of national and international strife and of wholesale bloodshed was one of great mental and artistic activity. The civilization and the culture, and the learning of China, flowed rapidly and steadily into Korea, and through Korea into Japan.

Sin-lo, Pe-tsi, and Ko-rai appear in their origins to have had nothing in common. They were alike in being conquered by at least one alien race. Each of the three nations was greatly enriched by an influx of, and intermarriage with, Chinese, Tartars, and several other peoples of Far Asia. Their rivalry and their warfare lasted for hundreds of years; then they were united under one monarch, and slowly and surely became one nation.

The ninth and the tenth centuries were centuries of peace in Korea, and our knowledge of Korea’s history during these two hundred years is most meagre. Sin-lo was then, and had been for some time, the dominant province, but the reigning house of Sin-lo had become enervated and incapable. In 912A.D.a Buddhist monk initiated a rebellion which spread with amazing rapidity, and was entirely successful. The monk proclaimed himself king, but he in his turn was rebelled against, conquered by, and slaughtered by a descendant of the kings of old Ko-rai, whose name was Wang-hien, or Wang-Ken. Wang-hien chose Kai-seng, which was then called Sunto, as his capital. He became absolute monarch of the whole peninsula, and gave back to it its ancient name of Ko-rai. Kai-seng is but a short distance north-east of Söul, and so the first capital of united, and possibly the last capital of united Korea, are but a stone’s throw from each other. A war which shortly occurred with the Kitan Tartars, who lived west of the Yalu River, resulted in a change of frontier, the Kitans taking and holding most of the north-western territory of Korea. From that day to this the boundaries of Korea have practically remained unchanged, and this brings us to the second period of Korea’s history.

Four hundred years of peace now fell upon Korea. These four were the most brilliant centuries in Korea’s history. Feudalism gave place to absolute monarchy, and the peninsula was divided into eight provinces, over each of which the king placed a governor. Buddhism became the national religion; temples, pagodas, monasteries, nunneries in the best forms of Chinese architecture, and in Chinese-like, but better than Chinese forms of architecture, were built everywhere. The naturally rich resources of the peninsula were developed, augmented, and made the most of, and a flourishing trade was driven with both of the rival kingdoms—China and Japan. But China still remained the fountain-head of Korean learning and culture. The wealthy and the noble Koreans sent their sons to China to be educated. This was the period of the Sung dynasty in China—the wonderful period of Chinese literature and art to which I referred a chapter or two ago. Korea, which was then more abjectly the vassal of China in culture, in letters, in art, and in sociology, than she was politically, followed as fast as she could in the footsteps of China’s literary and artistic progress. It was then that Korea first became deeply interested in Chinese classics, and from then until now a thorough knowledge of the Chinese classics has been, and is, the supreme test of Korean education and culture. Then the Koreans first learned to print, printing from raised letters cut in blocks of wood. Toward the close of these memorable four hundred years it is said that there were more books, more printed books in Korea than there were inhabitants. It was then that general education became a matter of course in the peninsula. It was then, as I have said, that Korean art was at its best and broadest; and it was then that the Korean alphabet was invented, or at least became generally used. Many scholars maintain even now that the Korean is the most beautiful, and the most sensible alphabetical system that the world has, or ever has had.

Early in the fourteenth century the Mongols had begun their run of unprecedented conquest. Khublai Khan and Genghis Khan, the mightiest Mongols of their time, determined to conquer the earth. Their ideas of the extent of the earth were limited, very limited, but within the narrow limits of those ideas they very approximately carried out their bold intentions. Korea was completely subdued.

The history of Korea during the period of the Mongolian supremacy in China is a history of entire subjection. Toward the decadence of the power of the Mongols Korea was called upon to conquer Japan, but escaped from the farce of trying to do so. For the Mongol was already tottering on his throne. The Mongols most in power were quarrelling among themselves, and plotting against each other, and the people whom they ruled had grown dissatisfied enough (as the Chinese once in a very great while do), to not only contemplate but execute a rebellion. During the last days of the Mongol’s already shattered power Korea was almost free from Chinese supervision, and altogether free from Chinese control; for China had more than she could do at home. At last a Chinese monk, a Buddhist priest, calling himself Ming, or “Bright,” pushed the insecurely seated Mongol from his throne. This priest proclaimed himself, and the people acclaimed him, the Emperor and Deliverer of China. He married that he might found a dynasty. The first Ming was indeed a man of might, and the period during which he and his descendants were supreme in China is peculiarly interesting to the student of Korean history. For it was during this period that the Koreans copied the Chinese Mings; assumed the dress in all its details which they have worn ever since, and many of their most characteristic customs. When the Mongols fell, the king of Korea, who seems to have been an exceptionally good sort, wished to give his one-time masters sanctuary in his hermit kingdom, but a greater than the king—a powerful courtier named Ni Taijo—disallowed the king’s judgment, dethroned the king, imprisoned him, and usurped, or at least ascended, the Korean throne, and established the present Korean dynasty. That was five hundred, or to be exact, five hundred and three years ago. The name of the peninsula was again changed, and it was re-named Ta Cho-sun. Söul, which he called, and which in fact we ought to call, Han-yang, was made the capital. And it was then that the famous wall of Söul was built, and then that her imposingly wide streets were laid out and made. Ni Taijo changed the boundaries of Korea’s eight provinces. Those boundaries have not been changed since. It was during his reign that the pale blue, which we carelessly and generally call white, became the colour of every ordinary Korean dress. It was then that the Korean hat in all its glory was born. It was then that the Korean top-knot was erected upon Korean heads. It was then that Buddhism made way for Confucianism; and it was then that the gaining of office or position of trust was determined solely by the result of competitive literary examinations. And it was then that the Koreans invented, as they did invent, in their part of the world at least, the art of printing by movable and cast metal type.

Again Korea had peace, peace for two hundred years. Then like the Romans of old the Koreans who, like them, had feasted and lounged too much, became enervated and thriftless. Japan grew bolder, and for more than a quarter of a century Korea was constantly ravaged by pirates and piratical armies from the islands of Japan. In 1592 Konishi and Kato devastated large tracts of Korea, and it was after their final expulsion, after the final expulsion of the power of which they were powerful units, that (as I mentioned before) according to many historians, religion fell in Korea into the disgrace from which it has never arisen. Ping-yang was the site of many of the most desperate struggles that took place between the natives and the invaders. All through Chosön’s history Ping-yang has been the battlefield of a large proportion of the most desperate conflicts that have taken place on Korean soil. In 1597 the Japanese made their second invasion of Korea. It was during this invasion that the Japanese seized upon vast quantities of Korean treasure and of art works—works of art which, transplanted to the fertile soil of Japan, quickly took root, and became the seed-plants of a considerable portion of Japan’s best art.

During this second Japanese invasion China, in answer to Korean prayers, sent vast reinforcements to the aid of the Chosönese. For seven years Korea suffered from fire, from pillage, from war, from pestilence, and from famine, and her already depleted resources were drained with the necessity of feeding and sheltering, willy-nilly, two great alien armies. A million Koreans died during these seven years; a million, beyond the normal death-rate, of men were killed in battle, or died after battle, or succumbed to starvation, or one of the dire diseases bred of war, and in war-time. The sun of Korea’s greatness set then, and never since have the Koreans been able to say, or to approximately say,⁠—

‘Now is the sun upon the high-most hill of our national day’s journey.’

Korea struggled, struggled bravely enough, to retrieve her fallen fortunes, but before her old wounds were healed new ones were inflicted. Beyond the mountains that marked, and still mark, her northern boundaries a mighty race had risen—a race that became supreme in China as in Korea, and a race that only now seems in danger of extermination or degradation. The Manchius dwelt where the people of old Fuyu had dwelt. They conquered Korea, and then they conquered China. In 1627 the Manchius practically mastered Chosön; and ten years later they so completely humbled the King of Korea that he acknowledged as his master the Manchiu Emperor, who was now supreme in Pekin, and the Korean King covenanted to send four times a year to the Tartar an enormous tribute, and the Koreans bound themselves to perform to the Tartar and to his represervatives the kow-tow which has played so ridiculous a part in our European difficulties with China, and to sing hymns of praise commemorative of the Manchius’ generosity and graciousness in not having wiped Korea from off the face of the Asiatic earth. Let me quote a short paragraph from an historian who never appears over-partial to China:⁠—

“Aside from the entrance at stated times of the imperial envoy to collect the tribute, and the annual embassy of Korean nobles to Pekin to do homage to ‘the Great Khan,’ the internal politics of ‘the little outpost state’ were not interfered with by the Chinese Government.”

Should Japan become the mistress of Korea; should Japan become the mistress of China—will she, I wonder, be as magnanimous?

Twenty years brought little or no change to the people of Chosön. In 1653 Hamel was wrecked upon the Korean shores, and what I have quoted from his memoirs indicates, by no means sufficiently, but as sufficiently as my space will allow me to indicate, the condition of Korea from then until 1777. And in 1777 begins the history of modern Korea.

That history affords neither pleasant writing nor pleasant reading to any one of European or Europeanly-American birth. Korea is hardly enough placed with China on the one hand and Japan on the other, but for all that she, perhaps because she has been the weakest and the most exposed of Oriental countries, has suffered most from—no, I do not mean suffered, but been most at the mercy of Europe. “Courtesy with the East, respect to the West, tribute to them both, and no foreigners wanted in the kingdom,” was Korea’s political creed when Korea ceased to be one of the intrinsically great nations of the past, and become one of the unjustly unimportant nations. During the last hundred or hundred and twenty years Korea has changed but little centrifugally, but centripetally she has changed, well—considering that she is Asiatic—enormously. Christianity, in an insidious Portuguese sort of way, had peeped into Korea many years before, but now Christianity is forcibly injected into Korea, injected in a way of which, however admirable it may seem to us, Christ would never have approved. Christianity, the species of Christianity offered to Korea, has not flourished there, and the nice, new Occidental civilization which was offered to Korea a year after the patriarchs of Massachusetts perfumed the Bay of Boston with tea-leaves, seems to have been rather a failure in the Land of the Morning Calm.

About the Jesuit fathers who sneaked into Korea under the shelter of the big hats that Korean widowers wear, and about the American and English missionaries who laid down their lives, and who have amplified and luxuriated their lives in Korea, I should like to say a good deal, but when one cannot say all that one might say and wishes to say, it is perhaps least stupid to say nothing. But to those who would like to study Christian missions in the East I would first of all recommend Mr. Curzon’s “Problems of the Far East,” and then, as far as Korea is concerned, I would recommend the works of the missionaries Griffis and Ross.

Korea itself has undergone little change since Hamel escaped from Korea. Korea has suffered during those years a good deal of change at the hands of others, a change that is, I think, not altogether to our credit. An American commodore opened Japan up to the West, and now (so at least they tell me), Japan is threatening to annihilate the West. Another American commodore, rather a noisier man, and not blessed with so fortunate a field of action, opened modern Korea to nineteenth century Europe and nineteenth century North America. Since then, the history of Korea has been a history of Korean degeneration, and European and United States advancement. The King of Korea has become a patron of telephones, and the hero of innumerable magazine articles—magazines published on both sides of the Atlantic.

Such is the outline of Korea’s history—hurried, dry, and incomplete; so incomplete, indeed, that it is not in truth an outline but rather scraps of outline. But Korea’s history is anything but dry, if we study it in something like intelligible entirety.

One who reads only English—or even the languages of modern Europe—but wishes to know Korean history in some detail, will be forced to do considerable literary browsing. A full and altogether satisfactory history of Korea has yet to be written in English. Its writing would involve years of earnest work, and could only be accomplished by one thoroughly familiar with the Chinese language and Chinese literature. In the meantime there is much interesting information to be found in periodicals, in English papers printed in Shanghai, and to be gleaned from Blue-books.

Both Ross and Griffis have contributed valuably to our literaturereKorea. But neither of them are the easiest of reading, and both write from a sectarian, if not a narrow point of view. No one who is interested in Korea can afford not to read Curzon’s “Problems of the Far East,” Lowell’s “Chosön,” Carles’ “Life in Korea,” and almost above all Dallet’s “Histoire de l’Église de Corée.” And don’t forget dear, quaint old Hamel. There are more to be by-all-means read, but not many, and in reading one we shall learn the titles of others.

The chapter headed “Korea,” in “The Life of Sir Harry Parkes” is, like all the other chapters in that admirable work, delightfully written, and peculiarly interesting. Korea has been rather cruelly used—it seems to me—but it is pleasant to feel that in connection with Korea, England has little or no cause to reproach herself.

CHAPTER XII.

THE SCOURGES OF CHINA.

It is the present war between China and Japan that has brought Korea to our general notice; has caused us to ask and learn something of where and what Korea is. It is this war that will largely open up Korea, directly or indirectly, to Occidental travellers, to Occidental adventurers, and to Occidental enterprise.

Whatever the ultimate effect of the war upon Japan the effect will be far greater upon Korea, greater even than it will be upon China. China is a huge place, and will, I think, change but slowly, no matter how great her defeat may be, no matter how many and how sweeping the concessions she may perforce yield to Japan. Korea is small and weak, and may, if force enough is brought to bear upon her, change swiftly.

Korea has been now almost lost sight of in the present struggle; because it has ceased to be the theatre of the strife. But the war concerns Korea no whit less than it concerns China and Japan. This war is an essential part of Korea’s history—the most recent scene in Korea’s dramatic life.

With the war in the details of its action we are all very familiar, at this moment. But I doubt if we are quiteau courantof the causes of the war; and we have yet much to learn of the two interesting peoples who are waging the war.

There are several reasons why China fell a fighting of Japan—China had to, for Japan forced the war—China hates Japan—China, an important part of China, was unnerved by a fearful plague and easily excited into indulging in the dissipation of war. It was easy and comparatively safe for Japan to make China fight, because China had for years so neglected the art of war (if so holy a name may be attached to so often so unholy a thing), that she was ill prepared to cope with any foe that was more than a foe of straw; was ill prepared but did not know it. The Chinese for long have not regarded warfare as the manliest of occupations. Scholars, not soldiers, are their beau ideals, and the scum of their populace fills the ranks of their standing army. Their officers know little of military tactics, and are wont to direct, from behind the curtains of palanquins, the actions of their troops.

Japan has fallen a fighting of China because she hates China; because she dearly loves a bit of glory, and saw a splendid chance to gain it; and because she too felt the need of a national stimulant: the course of her true politics had not been flowing over smoothly, and she had been badly unnerved by earthquake.

China is the home of the wild white roses, of supreme philosophy, and of deadly pestilence. The recent plague in Hong Kong and Canton was merely an outbreak of an inevitably recurrent pest which is the sure result of the conditions of Chinese life. We are railing loudly just now against Chinese dirt. I feel that Chinese dirt is very much less than Chinese poverty. And it is a significant fact that the dirt and the poverty are usually found together. The houses and grounds of the rich Chinese that I have known in Singapore, in Penang, in Shanghai, and in Hong Kong, have been models of order and neatness, if not (according to European standards) of beauty.

The poorer quarters of the Chinese cities are undeniably filthy. But it is the filth bred of overcrowding and of dire penury, and of the inability of the government to cope with such enormous masses of humanity, rather than of natural uncleanliness. It is an almost infallible rule that only lazy people are dirty; sloth and filth are old bedfellows. The Chinese are the most industrious, thrifty nation on our globe; and I am convinced that the national dirt, the dirt of the poorer classes, is their misfortune and not their fault.

But there the dirt is, and, like a thousand maggot-breeding filth-heaps, it is constantly creating horrid germs of deadly disease.

It is very much to our national shame that the Chinese quarters of Hong Kong are almost as filthy as the poorer parts of Canton. We are absolute in Hong Kong; but we have done disgracefully little for the sanitation of the native quarters in the island we have conquered.

And yet Hong Kong ought to be the healthiest city in the world, the freest from pestilence. I know of no other city so admirably situated for conditions of health. Aside from the beauty of the place, and regarding it only as adaptable to healthy modes of human life and residence, it is ideal. And our flag waves over Hong Kong. And yet but yesterday a plague was raging there; only to think of which must make the gorge of Christendom rise.

While the plague raged, no doubt everything was done that terror and wisdom could devise. But the evil is deep-rooted, and it will not be uprooted in an hour.

Except for their unavoidable proximity to the possibility of dire disease (in which the Chinese are born, live, and die), the European inhabitants of Hong Kong are in every way to be envied.

Alas! almost the latest duty of thedoyenof that Queen’s house was the sending of a disinfecting party through the plague-stricken districts of Hong Kong—a party including British soldiers, some of whom were attacked by the seemingly invincible plague, and died a death almost Chinese in its horror.

The conditions of well-to-do Chinese life are very pleasant in Hong Kong.

But in the Hong Kong of the poor there is nothing much but a tragic struggle for human existence, and misery, misery almost unalleviated, and yet not quite unalleviated. The poorest, hardest pressed of the Chinese have—more than most peoples—the love of home, the joy in work, the affection for kith and kin that go far to alleviate any lot, however hard. And they have other blessings—the poverty-cursed Chinese—they have their festivals and their temples. The cobbler, who sits by the wayside and works for a few sen, smokes now and again his tiny pipe of opium; he burns his incense sticks and his red, paper prayers in the joss-house, and once in every four years he contributes some mite of work, of treasure, or of interest to the Söul festival.

Plagues fall upon China almost with a grim regularity; they crush into terrible graves countless thousands. But China goes on, and the Chinese go on; and, ignorant as they may often be of the laws of sanitation, they remain for ever steadfast to themselves and to their country, and to what they conceive to be for the best advantage of both. What nation does more?

We have made many conquests in the East. But we have not been altogether victorious over Asiatic disease. We have carried our flag in triumph into the Chinaman’s Mecca—into Pekin. And we have knocked open the doors of the emperor’s palace, knocked them open with the butts of our rifles. We have made Shamien our own. We have made it bloom like a fair English garden, and at the very gate of Canton; where it lies a mute but eloquent reproach to the filth of the Chinese city. We have gained the probably most beautifully situated city in the world—the city of Hong Kong—and there we have built for our soldiers an almost ideal barrack. But we have been powerless—we are powerless to-day against the relentless outbreak of a Chinese plague. And Shamien—that proud spot of our, perhaps, supremest Chinese triumph—reeks with the poisonous stench that comes from Canton.

Alas! alas! We have paid a high price for our occupancy of Asia. We have often sacrificed to her our children.

The history of China is spotted with plagues. And the sanitary condition of many of the Chinese cities and the density of their populations are such that we can scarcely hope for China a future much freer from such plagues than her past has been.

Go into the native market in Hong Kong; see the burning sun pour down upon the half putrid fish and a hundred unwholesome looking native foods; see the dense, sweating, seething human mass that is packed in among the stalls, and you will wonder that Hong Kong is ever free from pestilence. But the European residents of Hong Kong are not, as a rule, over familiar with the details of the native quarter. They live on the Peak, or on the outskirts of the beautiful public gardens, where no smells reach them coarser than the indescribable perfume of the wisteria.

Nothing could be lovelier, happier than Hong Kong the European. It is a place of charming bungalows, of superb verdure, a place of green hills and of fanning breezes, a place of shady streets and sweetly fragrant nooks.

Nothing could be more picturesque, nothing could be sadder than most of Hong Kong the Chinese. It is a crowded place of deepest poverty. When I have said that, I have said it all.

As I have said, the Chinese are not, I believe, greatly responsible for either the gravity or the frequency of their epidemics. Poverty, extreme poverty, commits most of the crimes against the Chinese health. People who are too poor to buy soap cannot wash themselves, and much less their clothes. People who can afford none of the necessities of health cannot be blamed for falling ill. And the Chinese government, which is at the fountain head the most paternal of all governments (but corrupt in many of its branches), is unable to cope with the unavoidable poverty of China’s overplus of humanity in those parts of the empire in which the population is densest and most congested. It is a common mistake to suppose that there are more people in China than China could support if those people were equally scattered over her vast territory. But in the great centres of Chinese life the people are overcrowded to starvation and to pestilence.

Yes; things seem to be going rather badly in Asia just now—Mahommedan and Hindoo strife, mysterious and ominous mango smearing, native regimental insubordination, and buried treasure that refuses to be dug up, are rife in India and Burmah. Siam is slowly, but I fear surely, disappearing within the insatiable maw of France. China has been smitten down by a dire plague. Japan has been torn with earthquake: and now a black war cloud has broken over the Far East, drenching with its deadly rain of bullets Korea, China, and Japan.

For centuries Korea has given China and Japan an excuse to exchange discourtesies, and to vent a spleen, which for many hundreds of years has sometimes slept, but never slept soundly, and much less died.

The Koreans have never of recent years been skilful in averting calamity from themselves or from their country. The Japanese are as brave as they are venturesome. The knight errant spirit that characterized old feudal Japan has by no means died out of Japan the new, probably never will die out of Japan. It is “bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.” The land which was for so many decades the theatre of that dignified but horrible butchery called Hari-Kari, is not the land of cowards. Hari-Kari, or self-disembowelment, was looked upon in old Japan as a ceremonial of more than religious importance. And, even now, numbers of the Japanese deplore the abolition of Hari-Kari. It follows that the Japanese are neither afraid to die, nor reluctant to fight against fearful odds. But it is China who is fighting against fearful odds now. And yet I venture to think that in the long run Japan will lose more, gain less than her adversary. The Chinese are slow to anger. They are slower to forgive. They are not fond of withdrawing from any position they have taken. They are not prone to look at things through the eyes of others. They are not easy to convince. The Chinese in things military are shockingly behind the times, and the Japanese are splendidly up-to-date. But there are qualities that are, in the long run, more apt to win an Oriental war than being up-to-date.

China may cry, “Peccavi,” but she won’t mean it. Unless, indeed, she be permanently crippled she will bide her time, watch her opportunity, and fight again and to better purpose. Japan is China’s natural foe. China has forgiven us, I verily believe, for forcing ourselves into Pekin and for wresting from her Hong Kong. But she will never forgive Japan. And why should she? Shame to any nation that forgives a Port Arthur!

In half a day the Japanese can steam from their own coast to Korea: but also any Power in possession of Korea can steam from there to Japan as quickly. Korea is certainly more necessary to Japan than to China. But geographical propinquity does not necessarily constitute territorial right; and so far as we can judge the merits and demerits of so perplexed, so involved, so almost prehistoric, so Oriental a question, China has more right to Korea than Japan has. But international right is fast becoming (if it has not already become) a matter of national might, and concerning Korea the question of the moment is not, as it was a few months ago, “Who will fight the better, China or Japan?” but “How far shall we let them fight?”

Russia has her eye upon Korea. Even the United States may crave to stick a finger, a modest little finger, in this political pie.

What right have we to interfere in the quarrels of Eastern Powers? What right have we? It is too late for us to think of that now. We have kinsfolk in all those Oriental places, and shall have in the generations to come. It is our supreme duty to protect them, even though to do that ‘great right we do a little wrong.’ Russia securely, strongly lodged in Korea would not be an altogether desirable sight for British eyes.

And Korea, where does she come in in the present quarrel? Alas, she bids fair to go out, unless indeed Europe should be sentimentally chivalrous and forbid the disnationalization of one of the few remaining unchanged countries of the old Eastern world, and decree that Korea should remain yet a little longer a steadfast landmark upon the ever shifting sands of history.

What rights have the Koreans in the matter? Alas, it is also too late to ask that question. Their rights seem very apt to be torn into shreds between the dragons of China and Japan, or else to be (as most Eastern rights are) crushed into dust beneath the heavy but righteous foot of advancing civilization.

CHAPTER XIII.

JAPAN’S INGRATITUDE.

Japan is ungrateful. She always has been, and, I fear, always will be. She has achieved over an adversary, in most essentials abler than herself, a brilliant run of, at least temporary, victories, largely because she has adopted Western methods of warfare; and now she is celebrating the victory of her European-borrowed arms by slapping Europe in the face. How very like a woman! How very like Japan!

The Emperor of Japan has politely informed us—cautiously informed us through the Japanese minister in Washington—that we must please mind our own business, for “no offer of mediation on the part of a third Power would be accepted by Japan until her object, which was to crush the power of China, had been completely attained.”

And it is being more or less openly said (I believe the authority I quote to be entirely reliable) on the streets of Yokohama: “When we’ve finished China we must teach one of the big European Powers a lesson. England, for instance, thinks a great deal too much of herself and not half enough of us.” If Japan is really ambitious for a war with England, let us hope that she will soon find an excuse for it. The sooner such warfare is waged the better—for China—and it will not greatly inconvenience us.

Japan has drunk of the awful, red wine of war, and the wine has gone to her pretty little head. Let us hope that she will not have too much of a headache in the inevitable morning, and that she may, for the near future at least, have the good sense to drink our health and her own in the beverages that best suit her: a cup of tea and a wee thimbleful of saki.

There are two reasons why Japan has so far triumphed over China, reasons which prove Japan our debtor; and yet Japan has, as far as we are concerned, borne her honours so badly that it deserves at least our passing attention.

Compare China and Japan on the map; compare their populations and it certainly seems that by this time the Chinese Goliath should have crushed and appropriated the Japanese David. But maps don’t tell us everything, and figures lie, if we ask them to say more than they ought. Figures are excellent things, if we permit them to mind their own business. But they are not philosophers; they are not logicians. Then, too, David always has so many advantages over Goliath. David can get about so much quicker. He can move his body sooner than the giant can move one limb. His hand can receive the message sent it by his brain in a fraction of the time that the same transaction takes Goliath.

Perhaps we have all—those of us who are surprised at China’s at least momentary defeat—been looking too much upon the surface, taking a too topographical view of the situation. Bulk is not always a blessing. It may become an embarrassment. It is, at any rate, often misleading. The size of China, and its vast population have been misleading to many of us who have had more interest in the present Chino-Japanese war than knowledge of China and Japan.

I call the war the Chino-Japanese war, because it is a Chino-Japanese war. Korea is the excuse for the war, not the cause of the war. Poor, picturesque, badly-used place, let us pray that she may not be too the victim, altogether the victim of the war.

China has been, so far at least, quite unable to mobilize her forces. Japan—who is the art concentration of many nations—has concentrated her comparatively small, but altogether fine forces, concentrated them with a nicety and a shrewdness that might well be a lesson to the Europe from which she has learned her art of war.

The Art of War! Japan seems indeed to be making War a fine art—but, alas! she is making it, no less than it has always been, a butchery!

There is, however, an underlying fact, which seems to me to account above everything else—yes, and to account philosophically—for the humbling of China, and the swift advance of Japan. The Chinese are creative as a race; the Japanese are imitative. A creative nature is self-reliant; and an imitative nature is, of necessity, self-doubtful. China has been inclined to rely upon herself; Japan has doubted herself and relied upon Europe. China’s strength has been China’s weakness; the weakness of Japan has proven Japan’s strength. It is true that China has bought ships and guns from Europe; that she has borrowed officers to drill her soldiers, and to manage her ships; but all this has been done in a spirit of disallowance. She has always believed in herself. To her, all the rest of the world is, as it was to ancient Rome, “barbarian.”

Japan lacking, as a nation, the creative faculty, possesses, more eminently than any other nation, the imitative faculty. Her art is borrowed from China and Korea; her methods of government, and her methods of war from that Western world to which she has so lately, for the first time, opened her gates. Japan is victorious to-day because of her self-distrust, and because of her eager and compliant imitation of Western methods. China is defeated to-day because of her half-hearted adoption of European ways and means.

Japan jumps at conclusions with the swift intelligence of a bright woman. China proves, and proves again, the worth of any custom or method that she adopts. Japan improves everything that she adopts. China is more like a wise man, she understands everything that she adopts. China is the slower, but China is the surer.

Japan has so far had the best of the fight, because she has imitated us, and because she has been able to mobilize her forces.

Whether the present war will suddenly break through the thick crust of Chinese self-sufficiency, of Chinese bigotry, of Chinese hatred of change, remains to be seen. If it does, China may swiftly regain her lost ground. In any event it is not probable that so thoughtful, so wise, so reasonable a people as the Chinese will fail to sooner or later learn thoroughly the lesson which this present war preaches to them. Perhaps in a few months, perhaps in twenty or thirty years, but surely sometime, China will learn how right Galileo was, how decidedly the world does move, and how needful it is that we who live on the world, should move with the world. Then we may all learn how great a people the Chinese really are; how vastly superior in many ways to their more fascinating, more artistic, but less stable neighbours—the Japanese.

I am not, I know, taking a popular view of the relative admirableness of China and Japan; but I believe that I take the true view. It is a view diametrically opposed to the consensus of European opinion, but it is not a view altogether original with me. A number of eminent men, who have spent some of the best years of their lives in China and Japan, compare the two peoples quite as much to the advantage of China as I have ventured to do. In 1882 Herr von Brandt, who was then the German minister to Pekin, who had previously been in office in Tokio, an able diplomat, and a man greatly valued by Sir Harry Parkes, wrote to Sir Harry:—“The news you gave me about the treaty revision has interested me much. For my part I would see no objection to the institution of a kind of mixed court for all cases in which Japanese were concerned, provided the judges were elected from a certain number of persons nominated by the Treaty Powers. The proposal to submit foreigners to the Japanese police jurisdiction seems inadmissible; conflicts of all kinds and gravity would, in my opinion, be the immediate consequences of such a concession. In general it seems to me that the Japanese have done nothing which could entitle them to the concessions they demand, and that the experience of the past hardly authorizes any far-going experiment for the future; the fact that Japanese jurisdiction is at the present moment as bad as can be can hardly be given as a reason to extend it over those who are not subjected to it for the present. The opening of the country to foreign trade can hardly be considered as a fair equivalent, as the Japanese, if the measure is carried out, are certain to reap much more benefit from it than the foreigners will ever do. After all, I am glad that it is not my business to put the Japanese world right again: with all their faults there is much more steadiness and logic in the Chinese than in their high flightinesses the sons of the land of the Rising Sun.”

Yes; the Japanese have a graceful knack of quietly getting the best of most bargains, and certainly the opening of the Japanese treaty ports to Europeans has, as regards everything but art, benefited Japan far more than it has benefited Europe. Herr von Brandt’s prophecy has been more than fulfilled, and that gives some little weight to his opinion that there is more steadiness and logic in the Chinese than in the Japanese.

Sir Harry Parkes had as much cause as man well could have to hate the Chinese; and yet, again and again, he has felt impelled to utter some testimony in their favour. On the fourteenth of December, 1874, he wrote to Sir D. Brooke Robertson:—“I think our views resemble very closely on the China-Japan question, now of the past fortunately. The luck has fallen to Japan, who certainly did not deserve it. I can’t help feeling sorry to see the old country opposite give in, when she had right on her side, to this youngster among nations.”

How history repeats itself! Twenty years ago the war cloud that hung over China and Japan was fanned away by the temperate winds of European advice, absorbed in the sunshine of common sense. To-day the storm of war has burst over Further Asia, burst in splendid, awful fury; and the Chinese and Japanese are slaying each other by the shoal. We have taught them how to do it. And the Chinese Goliath lies smitten (smitten almost to death, at least so his enemy seems to think), by the well directed pebbles of Japan. Of the effect of the successive and reportedly crushing blows administered by Japan to her colossal neighbour, it is, of course, too early to speak with confidence. Success means so much to China, that should the present run of ill luck continue, the downfall of the reigning dynasty would not be surprising. A victorious Japanese army in the streets of Pekin would almost inevitably so result. Let us hope that China—China the picturesque, China the beautiful—will not be bowed so low as that. Our own interests in the Orient would suffer materially through such a radical disturbance of the balance of power. For our own sake, and for the sake of right, it is to be hoped that China will be spared the humiliation of opening the gates of her sacred and capital city to an invading army from Japan. That would be the saddest misfortune that has ever befallen China: sadder far than the misfortune that befell her when we took from her the island of Hong Kong, and flew our flag above the dragon on the imperial palace at Pekin. But so long as Japan is essentially stronger in army and in navy than China, China must submit, with what grace she can, to defeat. But having learned from us how to fight, it really is too bad of Japan to turn up at us her pretty, little, yellow nose, to shake her flower-crowned head at us in derision, or to make it uncomfortable for our countrymen and women within her gates.

This is as true of the Japanese to-day as when Sir Harry Parkes wrote it twenty years ago:—“The Japanese have committed the error of believing all that they have been told about themselves and increasing this by their own imagination, and the result is that their own little island is too small to hold them.”

At this moment Japan evidently believes that her present victories are attributable more to her own skill and prowess than to her exact and servile adoption of European methods and models, and so she is tossing her head and treating us a little rudely.

Ah, well! we all have to learn some sharp lessons, whether we are individuals or nations. China is learning such a lesson now. I wonder whose turn it will be next—Japan’s?

This, at least, when next Japan fights let us hope that she may have become Europeanized enough not to wage war before she declares it.

Ingratitude seems to me to have been the trait most pronounceably shown by the Japanese during this present struggle. And the desire of some Japanese women to join the army as combatants seems to me the most amusing incident in a war that has had more than one funny side to it. But there is one other thing to have been noticed about Japan of late: a thing that seems to have rather escaped notice—Japan is trembling.

In the glowing moment of her supreme victories, in this long hour of her almost unprecedented run of luck, does it seem more stupid, or more impertinent to speak of Japan as being a-tremble? The laws of some countries hold that truth is no libel. The laws of other countries hold that truth is the greatest libel. I am uttering libel or I am not uttering libel, according to the country by whose laws I may be judged. Most emphatically, I am uttering the truth. No other word so truly adjectives Japan as does the word trembling.

This is the age of earthquakes. Almost daily the papers record the upheaval of some part or other of the world. And earthquakes are becoming almost common where they used to be nearly or quite unheard of. Japan, as far we know, always has been, and probably always will be, the stronghold of earthquakes. That inscrutable some one whom some of us call God; that inscrutable something which some of us call Fate; that inscrutable some one or something of which the bravest of us, the most phlegmatic of us, the most callous of us, one and all, stand in more than wholesome dread; for uncountable centuries, has seen fit, and will see fit, to hold over the flower-crowned head of Japan a Damoclean sword. The thread by which that sword is held is very much frailer than the thread that, in the classic days of old Greece, held that sword’s prototype. It breaks, does the Japanese thread. It breaks very often. It breaks with a persistent irregularity that is almost regular in its frequency. And Japan is disembowelled with a Hari-Kari far more terrible, far more merciless than the Hari-Kari which used to be the glory of the well-born criminals, or the well-born unfortunates of old Japan.

The first time I ever saw a Japanese earthquake (and I have had the misfortune to see many), it occurred to me that the Japanese, who create nothing, who imitate and ornament everything, had caught from the brutal butchery of Nature (Nature who is worshipped in Japan, as she is worshipped almost nowhere else), the idea of that terrible self-annihilation which was for centuries the gruesome glory of Japan. Japan is the pet lamb of Nature, the favourite home of art, the chosen throne of beauty, and yet the Japanese always have had the greatest enthusiasm for the horrible in Nature, and the horrible in art.

Nature is, perhaps, the most convenient term by which we, who believe in God, we who believe in Fate, and we who believe in nothing, can agree to commonly express our common wish to personify that of which none of us know too much, but of which we all think, more or less, and of which most of us wish to speak rather frequently.

I have called Japan the pet child of Nature, and so she is. Not all the earthquakes that have ever out-canniballed the cannibals; not all the earthquakes that ever swallowed houses and gulped down humans, could counterbalance the enormous partiality which Nature shows for Japan. Never bloomed such flowers, never grew such trees, never did such moonlight, with such dappled gold and silver, glorify such landscapes. Verily doth Nature love Japan as she loves no other spot on earth. Out of the great womb of Nature Japan was born, and truly every star in heaven danced and shone the brighter. But Nature, like many another mother, seems to have overtaxed herself in giving to the world so sublime a child. The umbilical cord has never been cut between Nature and Japan. The Japanese have never ceased to suck the wonderful milk of Nature, the milk that has nourished in them their great love for the beautiful, their great appreciation of the beautiful, and their supreme gift of reproducing the beautiful. But all this seems to have worn on Nature. The mother who nurses her child beyond a physically reasonable period invariably suffers. The child may thrive, but the mother grows ill: most women who are ill are hysterical. Nature, if there is such a thing as Nature, is a mother. Nature, if there is such a thing as Nature, is a woman. Nature is a mother, because from Nature have we, all parts of our world, and all other worlds, been born. Nature is a woman, because no manly thing could be so cruel to its offspring as Nature is. The child is so over-grown, so hungry, so perpetually demanding of, draining Nature, that Nature, veriest woman that she is, must needs, once in a way, lose patience with Japan.

But save for her momentary losses of temper, Nature is to Japan the tenderest of mothers, fashioning for her, as all mothers love to fashion for their favourite children, the daintiest of garments. And never yet did pet child wear such fine frocks, such robes of soft but splendid beauty, as Nature makes, year in year out, season in season out, for Japan. She weaves them of flowers, she buckles them with brilliant berries, and she sprays them with a drench of soft, warm, unsoiling, and altogether incomparable perfume. She sings sweet songs of mother-love to her pet child. Such lullabies she croons to it! She keeps for it the most wonderful of orchestras. An orchestra that makes ceaseless, but everchanging music. Humming birds wing notes of music into that marvellous concerto, silver rills “that gush out i’ the midst of roses,” waterfalls that in the moonlight and in the sunlight kiss the moss-warmed rocks, and leap in passionate ecstasy into the arms of the flower-dressed earth, drip liquid notes of beauty into that wondrous symphony. The wings of butterflies add falsetto, but, oh! so sweet, notes, and the wind, as it wantons between the wanton trees, and kisses the fragrant flowers, steals from them their honey, and adds perfume unto perfume, and music unto music, until Japan, Nature’s pet baby, cuddles down into the warm eider-down of its cradle, an eider-down that is incomparably soft with flower-petals, and that smells of blossoms that are sweeter than music.

Nature does ten hundred gracious, gentle, mother-kindnesses to Japan, and Japan accepts them all, and asks for more, and then Nature, well, Nature’s nerves give out, and as many another mother, who has an almost idolatrous love for her child, has done, Nature gives Japan a fearful shaking. When Nature recovers herself a bit, and sees what she has done, she is always very sorry, and about the tumbled, broken, paper houses, through the ruined fields of paddy and of rice, over the heaps of torn and burned wisteria, well, she does what mothers have done before her, she stoops and kisses the place that she has made sting, she scatters violets over her pet child’s bruises, she makes vines, blue with blossom and purple with perfume, grow over the marks which she has made upon the dimpled limbs and the pretty features of her favourite, but somewhat trying child.

But a kiss never yet altogether made up for a blow. Our children forgive us our cruelties, but they never forget them; and Japan is always in a state of apprehension. Japan is always afraid that in another moment its mother Nature may lose her temper, and Nature does not often keep Japan long waiting.

For centuries the great artifice of the Japanese Government (or should I say the great art?) has been to divert the minds of the perpetually frightened Japanese people. The criminal going to the gallows often conserves his personal dignity, and augments his personal courage with a glass of brandy. The Japanese Government holds to the lips of its once-so-often-to-be-by-earthquake-shaken-and-perhaps-destroyed people a cup of redder wine—Blood. The blood of adversaries, or the blood of themselves, seems to be the liquor that, from the earliest history of Japan, has had the greatest power to intoxicate the Japanese people, and to make them forget the sword that hangs above them, and which in any moment may fall and cut into the bowels of their country.

Korea has, of course, been for a very long time an excuse for war between China and Japan. They seem to have an uncontrollable appetite for wrangling with each other, and poor Korea hangs, like a ready bone, between the open, snarling mouths of Ah-man and Yamamato.

But, for all that, I verily believe that the immediate causes of the present war in Asia were the plague in China, and the earthquakes in Japan. The minds of the Chinese, and the minds of the Japanese, had to be diverted, else might they both have gone mad. This is true, at least of Japan, who struck the first blow, and in many ways forced the war. Korea has been offered up in sacrifice by China and Japan, with a devotion to their own safeties, and a belief in their own gods, which would have done credit to Abraham. They poured the vitriol of their hatred over Korea, and lit her myriad gardens with the torch of war, as complacently as Moses slew the task-master in the brick-field of Pharaoh.

Earthquakes are perhaps as little understood as any of Nature’s mysterious phenomena. A new science has sprung up almost mushroom-like amongst us of recent years; a science that is attempting the elucidation to human understanding of the laws that govern earthquakes. This new science has not as yet made much positive headway, and seismologists themselves know comparative little of the phenomena they study.

To-day we are in a Japanese village. In every door-yard great clumps of gorgeous chrysanthemums echo the glory of the sunset, wonderful tangles of wisteria throw their plum-coloured shadows upon the clean white paper windows, and the clean white paper doors of the hundred or more clean little houses. Upon the spotless-floored, flower-wreathed verandahs the waning sunshine sketches in crimson, in purple, and in gold the outlines of the wisteria petals, and the wisteria leaves. Roses, crimson and white and yellow, spot the grass. Painted bowls of blue and white porcelain, heaped with silky rice, stand on the verandahs, and on one verandah, perhaps, stands an old bowl of yellow Satsuma, which holds the evening meal of rice. Lacquered trays of fish stand beside the bowls of rice. The families, soft-featured, pleasing of face, graceful of gesture, gentle of manner, squat artistically upon the spotless floors. The sun sets, the moon comes up, the rice and the fish have been eaten. The birds and the butterflies sing. All is peace and contentment. The beautiful bowls have been tenderly washed, and the villagers have gone to sleep, resting their elaborately dressed heads upon their queer little wooden pillows.

To-morrow we are in the same village, but where is the village? It is torn and crushed. A thrill has passed through the earth at sunrise The chrysanthemums shake their heavy heads in terror, the wisteria vines are alive with dismay, every purple head quivering with afright. Every golden bell upon every crimson, lacquered, carved temple cries out in alarm so musical, so sweet, that it is incomprehensible that even so angry, so momentarily relentless a mother as Nature is not moved to pity, and to stay her hand. But no. The wisterias are roughly wrenched from off the walls up which they were wont to climb, decking foot after foot with their lavish beauty. The chrysanthemums are torn into rags so small and pitiful, that if here and there we find an unmutilated petal it seems to us quite huge.

There are few sights more pitiful than the sight of a Japanese village that has been broken by earthquake. Bits of wood, shreds of paper, wrecks of trees, broken flowers, torn vines are tangled together in picturesque, but deplorabledébris. The people are homeless, at the best, more than probably, they, too, are torn and maimed, most possibly they are killed. The rice is spilled, and the bowls of blue, and white, and of yellow Satsuma are broken. Silver pipes, torn kimonos, bits of pottery, that if whole again were worth a king’s ransom, strew the scene, and for the moment hide the gashes in the ground. And yet, like everything else in Japan, even this scene of desolation has its juvenile aspect; it looks not unlike a toy that a spoiled child has broken in anger.

The trouble, the misery, the agony, physical and mental, that earthquakes entail year in and year out on the people of Japan is beyond exaggeration, and quite beyond the pale of light writing. All thinking travellers must feel that it is no wonder that a people periodically subjected to such momentous torture, periodically need a big stimulant. And so, perhaps, it is less shame (than at the first glance it seems) to the powers that in Japan be, that soon after the recent disembowelment of Nagasaki, and the upheaval of many other Japanese states and villages, they, the powerful ones of Japan, have seen fit to go to war with China.

The plague that so recently devastated China, though more repulsive in detail, is far less hopeless to contemplate than the Japanese earthquakes. If China should ever come to the adopting of fairly proper sanitary laws, if China’s poverty should ever go down once and for all beneath the iron heel of China’s really vast common sense, and China’s infinite capacity of contrivance, then would China, always vigorous, be baptized into new health, and then would China’s plagues be matters of the past.

I am fain to hope all good things for China. But I fear that earthquakes will never be matters of the past in Japan. Well, both these peoples—one very great, the other very charming—have been sorely afflicted within the last year, and both have fell a-fighting.

We can only hope that right may prove mighty, and that in the near end peace may crown the Asiatic all.

We always think of Japanese women as the embodiment of everything that is feminine and gentle. And with the exception of the yoshiwara and the hardest worked women of the coolie class, we picture the women of Japan as shrinking from publicity, from unnecessary exertion, and from anything bordering on self-assertion. Yet in the days gone by Japan has had a class of women who have been quite opposite to all this, and yet who have been neither yoshiwara nor coolies. I mean the Japanese Amazons, who have more than once played active parts in Japanese warfares. This class has quite died out, but during the present Chino-Japanese war a number of Japanese women of high birth have petitioned the Mikado to permit them to join the army—join it as active soldiers—at least, so a recent despatch says. This is funny; but not in the least incredible. The Japanese are the funniest people alive. They are perpetually doing the most unexpected, I might almost say the most indefensible things, but they do them with such an air of artistic propriety, that it is a very keen-eyed European indeed who realizes that anything not altogetherau fait, mentally or morally, has happened.

The Japanese are so incapable of agaucheriethat we do not appreciate their very extensive capacity for folly.

A Japanese woman in the thick of the fight! Her kimono well tucked up from her little dimpled feet. Her obi bulging with cartridges! A knapsack rubbing corns on the sweet, stooped, brown shoulders! Armed cap-à-pie! A plumed helmet crushing down the elaborate shape of her perfumed coiffure! A sword hitting roughly against the warm limb, to which bright-eyed, brown children have been wont to gently cling! A great coarse gun chafing the soft arm and softer breast where laughing, yellow babies have slept and dreamed glad, soft dreams, and as they learned to love their mother’s milk, learned the three great lessons of Japanese life: learned to be happy, learned to be courteous, learned to be beautiful and artistic! It makes me laugh.

And yet I do not discredit the veracity of the telegram. The Japanese women are very, very drowsy. But when they wake up—and semi-occasionally they do wake up—they wake up with a start.

Great occasions seem to infuse them with electricity. I quite believe that to-day there are in Japan thousands of delicate, daintily accustomed, women who would gladly join the active ranks of war. Japanese patriotism is as supreme, as gracious, as graceful as Japanese art; and unlike Japanese art it is often visionary.

That the Japanese women want to fight the Chinese soldiers—is very amusing, and rather interesting. It proves that they have pluck. It proves that they have bad taste. That it does prove them guilty of bad taste makes it remarkable. The Chino-Japanese wrangle over Korea is, I believe, the first event in all our world’s long history that has convicted the women of Japan of bad taste.

Whether any Japanese women would prove effective soldiers, I doubt. I doubt if even the women of the coolie class: the women who sort tea in Kobe, the women who, in Nagasaki, running up and down the sides of P. and O. and other steamers, carry upon their muscular brown backs, murderous loads of coal, would advantageously augment the Japanese army. I doubt if the women of the Ainos (the Ainos are the fiercest, wildest people of Japan) would acquit themselves usefully in the field of battle. That the women of Japan would acquit themselves bravely, nobly, in the terrible moment of battle, admits of no doubt. But to be brave is one thing; to be noble is another; to be useful is still another.

Greatly to his credit (he seems to be—take him all in all—a very worthy, manly sort of fellow), the Emperor of Japan has not, I believe, allowed the women of Japan to swell the pretty ranks of his victorious army.

Yes; the Japanese army is a pretty army. I am speaking disrespectfully of the army of a nation that has beaten the great nation of China! China is not beaten yet. Japan has trod hard, very hard on one of China’s toes, and the toe is crushed and bleeding. But China—great big, broad, yellow China is not beaten; and won’t be for a few days more.

The Manchu dynasty may be unthroned. But China will go on for hundreds of years very much as she has gone on for hundreds of years. The Japanese army has proved itself a very industrious, capable, workman-like army indeed; but for all that, it is a pretty army.

The Japanese soldiers are plucky little heroes, every one of them, but they look for all the world like toy warriors—toy warriors in nice new uniforms.

If Japan were engaged in war, not with China, but with one of the first-class European Powers, Japan would fight as bravely as she is fighting now, every bit as bravely, but would her success be so swift and meteor-like? I wonder.

If Japan should ever fall a-fighting of a Western power, then I advise the Mikado to enlist as many of his lady subjects as he can, and when the bugle sounds the battle hour, place them in the front ranks. Then might Japan hope to conquer, not one, but every nation in Europe, and have at her feet every army in Christendom. No European soldier could draw sword, or aim gun against the Japanese army, if its front ranks were filled with almond-eyed, smiling-mouthed, crêpe-clad, Amazons. Then would the British soldier cease to sing “God Save the Queen” and “Rule Britannia.” Then would he stand at attention before the ranks of Japan; and this the battle hymn he’d sing:⁠—

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