The only solution I have ever reached, and that I hold but weakly, is, that in accordance with the law of the survival of the fittest, none but exceptionally hardy specimens ever reach adolescence, or even early childhood, and that having survived the awful tests of infancy, they are able to endure most trials which befall later. But even these, so to speak, galvanized-iron interiors are not always proof. It takes time, but every five or six years, by great care and industry, a bacillus develops itself, so hardened, so well armed, so deeply toxic, that even Koreans must succumb, and then there is an epidemic of cholera. Eight years before, in 1887, the plague swept through the land, and thousands fell. Christians, both missionaries and natives, united in prayers that God would stay the scourge. Physicians pronounced it contrary to the laws of nature that it should stop before frost came to kill the bacilli, but, in wonderful justification of faith, the ravages of the plague were abruptly checked in the midst of the terrible heat of the last days of August and the first of September. Chapter IX Difficulty of Enforcing Quarantine Regulations--Greedy Officials “Eat” Relief Funds--Americans Stand Alone to Face the Foe--The Emergency Cholera Hospital--The Inspection Officers--We Decide to Use the Shelter--A Pathetic Case--The Jesus Man--Gratitude of the Koreans--The New Church--The Murder of the Queen--Testimony of Foreigners--The Official Report. And now again the rod was to fall. The disease began with terrible violence, men in full vigor in the morning were corpses at noon, several members of the same family often dying the same day. It cropped out in one neighborhood after another with a steadily marked increase every day, that was frightful in its unrelenting, unswerving ferocity. The Japanese and many of the more enlightened Koreans took the alarm early, and seeking the counsel of European and American physicians planned to establish quarantine and sanitary regulations for the whole country, but as an astute young Korean sadly remarked, “It is easy enough to make the laws, it is more than doubtful whether they can be enforced.” If officials and soldiers are sent to enforce quarantine, there is little doubt among those who know customs and people that only too many of them will be susceptible to a very small bribe. When the necessity for quarantining Seoul from Chemulpo was mentioned, the high officials themselves said it would be impossible on account of the importance of the trade between the two places. One instance will show the hopelessness of the attempt to carry out sanitary regulations.