Official life has its sunshine and shadows in this land as elsewhere, but perhaps one of the hardest tasks before the Corean ruling classes of this and the next generation is the duty of diligently eating their words. Accustomed for centuries to decry and belittle the foreigner from Christendom, they must now, as the people discern the superiority of westerners, “rise to explain” in a manner highly embarrassing. In intellect, government, science, social customs, manual skill, refinement, and possession of the arts and comforts of life, the foreigner will soon be discovered to be superior. At the same time the intelligent native will behold with how little wisdom, and how much needless cruelty, Chō-sen is governed. The Japanese official world has passed through such an experience. If we may argue from a common ancestry and hereditary race traits, we may forecast the probability that to Corea, as to Japan, may come the same marvellous revolution in ideas and customs. CHAPTER XXVII. FEUDALISM, SERFDOM, AND SOCIETY. It is remarked by Palladius that the Fuyu race, the ancestors of the modern Coreans, was the first to emerge from the desert under feudal forms of organization. The various migrations of new nations rising out of northern and eastern Asia were westward, and were held together under monarchical systems of government. The Fuyu tribes who, by turning their face to the rising, instead of the setting sun, were anomalous in the direction of their migration, were unique also in their political genius. Those emigrants who, descending from the same ancestral seats in Manchuria, and through the peninsula, crossed toward Nippon, or Sunrise, and settled Japan, maintained their feudalism until, through ambitious desire to rival great China, they borrowed the centralized system of court and monarchy from the Tang dynasty, in the seventh century. The mikado, by means of boards or ministries like the Chinese, ruled his subjects until the twelfth century. Then, through the pride and ambition of the military clans, which had subdued all the tribes to his sway, feudalism, which had spread its roots, lifted its head. By rapid growths, under succeeding military regents, it grew to be the tree overspreading the empire. It was finally uprooted and destroyed only by the revolution of 1868, and the later victories of united Japan’s imperial armies, at an awful sacrifice of life and treasure.