The impression which I received as to the capacity and character of the Korean official and Yang-ban (or “gentry”) class was, on the whole, not reassuring in regard to their real willingness or ability to inaugurate and support governmental and industrial reforms in Korea. It is indeed difficult for one born and fostered under an Occidental—and, perhaps, especially an American—system of civilization justly to appreciate the institutions and the personal characteristics of the men of the Orient. Of this difficulty I had had an initial experience on my first visit to Japan fifteen years ago. Repeated visits to Japan, and intimate intercourse with Japanese of various classes, together with painstaking observation of the people, had enabled me to overcome this difficulty to a considerable extent, so far as the Land of the Rising Sun is concerned. But, as has already been indicated, Old Japan was really more like Mediæval Europe in many of its most essential psychological and social characteristics, than like either modern India, or China, or Korea. A winter spent in travel and lecturing rather widely over India was of more important service in coming to an understanding of the upper classes in Korea. This, too, is insufficient for a standard of comparison. With the high-caste Hindu a Westerner of reflective mind will, of course, have many intellectual interests in common. With the Korean Yang-ban, except in the very rarest cases, there can be no common interests of this kind. The problems of life and destiny, the Being of God, the constitution of the universe, the fundamental principles of ethics, politics, and law are of little concern to him. It is doubtful, indeed, whether it has ever dawned upon his mind that there are such questions worthy of patient consideration by the reflective powers. A few, but a few only—such, at any rate, was the impression made upon me—have a genuine, unselfish, and fairly intelligent sentiment of patriotism as distinguished from a desire to use office and influence for the promotion of their own self-interested ends. And these few—even that still smaller number who to the sentiment of patriotism add manly courage, strength of purpose, and readiness to suffer—are incapable of combining their forces so as to carry through in their own land any policy to secure the most imperatively needed reforms. After discussing this matter repeatedly with one of Korea’s most appreciative and respected foreign friends, I forced him to this admission: namely, there were not, then, so far as he knew, two leaders of men in all Korea who could come together, trust each other, agree together, and stand together, to fight and work for the good of their country to the bitter end. Moreover, had it been possible to find two, or even twenty, such strong and trusted political leaders, under his late Majesty and the unpurged court of his rule, the reformers could not have escaped exile or assassination, so far as Majesty and