Up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Korea refused all
intercourse with foreign nations. Peaceful ships that approached its
uncharted and unlit shores were fired upon. Its only land approach, from
the north, was bounded by an almost inaccessible mountain and forest
region, and by a devastated "No Man's Land," infested by bandits and river
pirates. When outside Governments made friendly approaches, and offered to
show Korea the wonders of modern civilization, they received the haughty
reply that Korea was quite satisfied with its own civilization, which had
endured for four thousand years.

Even Korea, however, could not keep the world entirely in the dark about
it. Chinese sources told something of its history. Its people were the
descendants of Ki-tzse, a famous Chinese sage and statesman who, eleven
hundred years before Christ, moved with his tribesmen over the river Yalu
because he would not recognize or submit to a new dynasty that had usurped
power in China. His followers doubtless absorbed and were influenced by
still older settlers in Korea. The result was a people with strong national
characteristics, different and distinct from the Chinese on the one side
and the Japanese on the other.

We knew that, as Korea obtained much of its early knowledge from China, so
it gave the younger nation of Japan its learning and industries. Its people
reached a high stage of culture, and all records indicate that in the days
when the early Briton painted himself with woad and when Rome was at her
prime, Korea was a powerful, orderly and civilized kingdom. Unhappily it
was placed as a buffer between two states, China, ready to absorb it, and
Japan, keen to conquer its people as a preliminary to triumph over China.

In the course of centuries, it became an inbred tradition with the Japanese
that they must seize Korea. Hideyoshi, the famous Japanese Regent, made a