prevent prior purchase by speculators and other indirect attempts to obtain extravagant prices. The military authorities, under the pressure of what they regarded as necessity, solved these difficulties in the military way—a way that certainly does not commend itself to civilians in times of peace, but which has been employed too often by all the other civilized nations to enable them to cast stones freely at the Japanese. Even by these high-handed measures they could not avoid, in certain cases, paying much more for land owned by foreigners than it was really worth.[83] It must further be confessed that a considerable number of Japanese sharpers—for the most part usurious money-lenders—have obtained land from Koreans in unjust and oppressive ways. This species of robbery is made the more difficult to detect and punish for the following reasons: The Korean customs and laws concerning the transference of titles to land are inadequate and confusing (for this reason, some of the landed property belonging to other foreigners than the Japanese, and even to the missionary bodies, would have no little difficulty in establishing title); the Koreans are given to issuing false and forged deeds, or in their ignorance claiming title and conferring title where no such right exists; finally, in numerous instances, both Korean or foreign “squatters” (see p. 295 _f._) and the government or some of its officials are asserting, either honestly or fraudulently, their holding of good title to the same piece of land. On all this class of offences we may trust implicitly the statement of the foreign official (an American) whose duty has led him to examine into a large number of these cases: “The theft of land by eviction, false deeds, etc.,” says this authority, “is another offence upon which great stress has been laid. Undoubtedly there were a number of cases of this kind, although here again exaggeration has been at work. The commonest instances were those where money-lenders were concerned; and, in these cases, as in almost all others of the kind, Koreans were associated in some way or other with the frauds which were perpetrated. A spendthrift son or nephew would give false title-deeds, or even pawn the genuine ones without authority; a Korean rascal would conspire with a Japanese of the same kidney to defraud other Koreans, and so on through the long gamut of fraud wherein Korean connivance was an indispensable prerequisite to success. The offences relating to land have now been rendered practically impossible through the promulgation of land regulations by the Residency-General.”