In a word, offences of this kind committed by the Japanese against the Koreans, however numerous and grievous they may have been, have proved short-lived; they were formerly due to the disturbed conditions of a period of war, and will now speedily be brought to an end. Summing them all up, and even without making allowance for exaggerations, the cry of the Koreans against the Japanese on the charge of fraud and oppression touching their land is only as a drop to a good-sized bucket compared with the cry of the Irish against the English, or of the Koreans themselves against their own countrymen. The wrongs are small indeed as compared with those which have characterized the behavior of Americans against Americans in our own West.[84] Of brutal and murderous assaults from Japanese upon Korean men and women there are indeed instances; but the cases prove on examination to have been by no means frequent. They have been, on the whole, fewer than such crimes are accustomed to be between peoples of two nations similarly placed. Indeed, they have been fewer than those occurring to-day between different classes and different nationals in many of the civilized countries of the Western World. They bear no comparison to the horrors which have for centuries been familiar in most of the Orient, including Korea itself. “Wholesale military executions,” for example, of the Koreans who tore up the track of the military railroad have been charged against the Japanese as virtually murders. But during the entire war there was never a single instance of what is known as “drum-head court martial” of a Korean for such an offence. After the trial the evidence in each case was transmitted to the Headquarters at Seoul, where the case was confirmed, modified, or reversed. The Japanese military authorities consented to have a Korean official present at each trial as an _amicus curiæ_ of the defendant; but the Korean Government declined to be represented and claimed that all such cases should be tried before their own officials only. What would have been the outcome of such a committal of the most vital military interests of Japan to Korean magistrates it needs no great amount of experience to judge. A Korean, for example, who had been arrested by a Japanese _gendarme_ and taken before a native magistrate was duly punished for “throwing a stone at the railway!” But on his being rearrested and tried before a military court it was established that the man had been repeatedly convicted of piling stones upon the track with a view to wreck the trains conveying the Japanese soldiers; whereupon the sentence of the military court was confirmed from Headquarters and the man was quite properly executed.