In considering all the subsequent relations of Japan and Korea two things should be kept distinctly in view as determining questions of justice and injustice, of wisdom or unwisdom, in the policy of both countries. In the first place: In order to conclude “a treaty of commerce and amity which recognized the independence of Korea,” Japan rather than engage in a punitive war, had encountered in its own territory a rebellion which cost the Government of the Restoration no less than 60,000 men and 416,000,000 _yen_. And second, in allowing this treaty to go through in the form which it actually took, China had been convicted of the duplicity and wholly untenable character of its claims to exercise the rights of suzerainty over Korea. On the latter point Minister Rockhill[16] affirms that the conclusion in 1876 of the treaty of Kang-wha between Japan and Korea “marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the latter country, its entry into the family of nations.” “Prior to the Kang-wha treaty,” this authority goes on to say: “The nature of Korea’s relation to China was a puzzle to Western nations. They were told, at one and the same time, that Korea, though a vassal and tributary state of China, was entirely independent so far as her government, religion, and intercourse with foreign states were concerned—a condition of things hardly compatible with our ideas of either absolute dependence or complete independence.” “In 1871 the Chinese Foreign Office wrote the United States Minister in Peking, Mr. Frederick F. Low, who had informed it of his recent appointment by his Government as special envoy to Korea, and was about proceeding there, that: ‘Korea is regarded as a country subordinate to China, yet is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things has China hitherto interfered.’”[17] But the first Article of the treaty signed in 1876 with Japan reads as follows: “Chosen, being an independent state, enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan”; and in 1882 the King of Korea wrote to the President of the United States, when the two countries were about to enter into treaty relations, pledging his Government that the terms of the treaty should be “carried into effect according to the laws of independent states.” It was this not merely theoretical suzerainty, but a pernicious practice of interference and dictation on the part of China over Korea, joined to the utterly corrupt and weak government of the latter country, which led inevitably to the war between the former and Japan. Similar claims of the Government of Peking, under existing political and social conditions, over the weaker states which were alleged to be dependencies of this Government, the civilized nations of the world have repeatedly found themselves compelled to disregard; and this, in the interests of the dependent people themselves.