It requires a ruler of real ability to be equal to the pressure brought upon him by the diverse and hostile political parties. Nominally sovereign of the country, he is held in check by powerful nobles intrenched in privileges hoary with age, and backed by all the reactionary influences of feudalism. The nobles are the powerful middle term in the problem of Corean politics, who control both king and commons. The nobles have the preponderance of the government patronage, and fill the official positions with their liegemen to an extent far beyond what the theory of the law, as illustrated in the literary examinations, allows them. A native caricature thus depicts the situation. Chō-sen is represented as a human being, of whom the king is the head, the nobles the body, and the people the legs and feet. The breast and belly are full, while both head and lower limbs are gaunt and shrunken. The nobles not only drain the life-blood of the people by their rapacity, but they curtail the royal prerogative. The nation is suffering from a congestion, verging upon a dropsical condition of over-officialism. The disease of Corea’s near neighbor, old Japan, was likewise a surplus of government and an excess of official patronage, but the body politic was purged by revolution. The obstructions between the throne and the people were cleared away by the removal of the shō-gunate and the feudal system. Before the advent of foreigners, national unity was not the absolute necessity which it became the instant that aliens fixed their dwelling on the soil. Now, the empire of the mikado rejoices in true political unity, and has subjects in a strong and not over-meddlesome government. The people are being educated in the rudiments of mutual obligations—their rights as well as their duties. The mikado himself took the oath of 1868, and his own hand shaped the august decree of 1881, which will keep his throne unshaken, not because it was won by the bows and arrows of his divine ancestors, but because it will rest broad-based upon the peoples’ will. So in Chō-sen the work of the future for intelligent patriots is the closer union of king and people, the curtailment of the power of the nobles, and the excision of feudalism. Already, to accomplish this end, there are Coreans who are ready to die. During the last decade, the pressure from Japan, the jealousy of China, the danger from Russia, the necessity, at first shrunk from and then yielded to, of making treaties with foreign nations, has altered the motives and objects of Corean politics. Old questions have fallen out of sight, and two great parties, Progressionists and Obstructionists, or Radical and Conservative, have formed for the solution of the problems thrust upon them by the nineteenth century. CHAPTER XXVI. ORGANIZATION AND METHODS OF GOVERNMENT.