It must doubtless be confessed that under the ex-Emperor the efforts of the Residency-General to effect the needed reforms were successful only to a limited extent. But with his last piece of intriguing to “relieve the Imperial treasury of its funds,” by sending a commission to the Hague Conference, “in co-operation with native and foreign schemers,” the old era came quickly to an end. The history of its termination will be told elsewhere; but the fact has illumined and strengthened the hope that Korea, too, can in time produce men fit to rule with some semblance of honesty, fidelity, and righteousness. Meantime, they must be largely ruled from without. How this hope of industrial and political redemption may be extended to the people at large and applied to the different important interests of the nation, both in its internal and foreign relations, will be illustrated in the several following chapters. Now that the Emperor[57] is publicly committed to an extended policy of reform; that the Ministers are for the first time in the history of Korea really a Cabinet exercising some control; that the Resident-General has the right and the duty to guide and to enforce all the important measures necessary to achieve reform; that the foreign nations chiefly interested have definitively recognized the Japanese Protectorate; and that the leaders of the foreign moral and religious forces are so largely in harmony with the plans of Japan;—now that all this is matter of past achievement, the prospects for the future of Korea are brighter than they have ever been before. One may reasonably hope that the time is not far distant when both rulers and people will be consciously the happier and more prosperous, because they have been compelled by a foreign and hated neighbor to submit to a reformation imposed from without. That they would ever have reformed themselves is not to be believed by those who know intimately the mental and moral history and characteristics of the Koreans. CHAPTER XIII RESOURCES AND FINANCE