When an offender in the military or literary class is sentenced to death, decapitation is the rather honorable method employed. The executioner uses either a sort of native iron hatchet-sword or cleaver, or one of the imported Japanese steel-edged blades, which have an excellent reputation in the peninsula. Undoubtedly the severity of the Corean code has been mitigated since Hamel’s time. According to his observations, husbands usually killed their wives who had committed adultery. A wife murdering her husband was buried to the shoulders in the earth at the road side, and all might strike or mutilate her with axe or sword. A serf who murdered his master was tortured, and a thief might be trampled to death. The acme of cruelty was produced, as in old Japan, by pouring vinegar down the criminal’s throat, and then beating him till he burst. The criminal code now in force is, in the main, that revised and published by the king in 1785, which greatly mitigated the one formerly used. One disgraceful, but not very severe, mode of correction is to tie a drum to the back of the offender and publicly proclaim his transgression, while the drum is beaten as he walks through the streets. Amid many improvements on the old barbarous system of aggravating the misery of the condemned, there still survives a disgraceful form of capital punishment, in which the cruelty takes on the air of savage refinement. The cho-reni-to-ta appears only in extreme cases. The criminal’s face is smeared with chalk, his hands are tied behind him, a gong is tied on his back, and an arrow is thrust through either ear. The executioner makes the victim march round before the spectators, while he strikes the gong, crying out, “This fellow has committed [adultery, murder, treason, etc.]. Avoid his crime.” The French missionaries executed near Seoul were all put to death in this barbarous manner. Officials often receive furloughs to return home and visit their parents, for filial piety is the supreme virtue in Chinese Asia. The richest rewards on earth and brightest heaven hereafter await the filial child. Curses and disgrace in this life and the hottest hell in the world hereafter are the penalties of the disobedient or neglectful child. The man who strikes his father is beheaded. The parricide is burned to death. Not to mourn long and faithfully, by retiring from office for months, is an incredible iniquity. Coreans, like Japanese, argue that, if the law punishes crime, it ought also to reward virtue. Hence the system which prevails in the mikado’s empire and in Chō-sen of publicly awarding prizes to signal exemplars of filial piety. These in Japan may be in the form of money, silver cups, rolls of silk, or gewgaws. In Corea, they are shown in monumental columns, or dedicatory temples, or by public honors and promotion to office. Less often are the rewarded instances of devotion to the mother than to the father.