“In some cases it is a question of building churches and collecting funds from the villages about. If any refuse to pay, they are bound and beaten and rendered helpless. When certain ones, in answer to petition, have been ordered arrested, the police have been mobbed and the officers of the law have been unable to resist it. While investigating a case on behalf of the people, I sent police to arrest Catholics in Cha-ryung. They raised a band of followers, beat off the police, arrested them, and dismissed them with orders not to return. Then I sent a secretary to remonstrate with them. At that the Sin-ch’un Catholics, a score or more of them, armed with guns, arrested the secretary, insulted him, etc.” One of the priests, who is apparently most influential and has been most notorious, whose Korean name is Hong, and who is known among foreigners as Father Wilhelm, told my husband that the native Romanists were not to be blamed for all this, for they had only obeyed his orders. Mr. Underwood had had a slight acquaintance with this priest for some years, meeting him occasionally and knowing little of his life, but supposing he was doing an earnest if mistaken work of self-sacrifice, he was unable to believe that the priest was cognizant of all that was being done by his followers, until he had both written and had a personal interview with him, when he was sorrowfully forced to see that rumor had not misrepresented his conduct. This sad condition of things might have gone on, no one knows how long, but some of the people so robbed and tortured were Presbyterian Christians, and there is something about Protestant Christianity that resists oppression and favors a growth of sturdy independence and a love of freedom and fair play. One of these men was a particularly determined fellow who had been persistently seeking justice ever since, and would not be discouraged or daunted. He first went to the missionaries, who told him to take the matter to the Korean courts, but as the provincial courts were quite helpless against such a giant evil, he went up to the capital. The officials at the capital, probably in awe of the French, dared not interfere. He and his companion, another sturdy farmer like himself, went from one missionary to another in Seoul, all of whom put them off, disliking to take up native quarrels, and on principle opposed to using influence with Korean officials, and none of them realizing to what threatening dimensions the affair had grown. These poor men were not eloquent, they could only tell a plain, simple story, but they knew that they and thousands of others were deeply wronged and were able to do one thing well, namely, to persist. Persist they did with unwearied resolution.