On Sunday evening, Mr. Pak Yong-hwa, Director of the Audit Bureau of the Imperial Household Department, was assassinated at his house. On that evening Mr. Pak had nearly a dozen visitors, and while he was conversing with them shortly after ten o’clock, the card of another visitor, not known to him, was brought in. Mr. Pak saw the man in a separate room, and no sooner had he begun to talk with him than another man rushed into the room through a window and stabbed Mr. Pak in the right breast, inflicting a wound four inches deep. Seeing their victim drop mortally wounded, the assassins hurriedly left, discharging a few shots from their revolvers to prevent pursuit. They are said to have been attired in foreign dress, and from their accent it is inferred that they are most probably from Keng-Sang-do. The unfortunate Minister died from his wound while in the palanquin on the way to the Japanese hospital. Marquis Ito, supposing from the news received by telephone that acting Prime Minister Pak was the victim, started at once for the hospital; but learning, before reaching there, of the real name of the victim, and of his death, he returned to the Residency. The next day H. M. the Emperor caused a chamberlain to pay a visit of condolence to Mr. Pak’s residence; but the city of Seoul and the country of Korea went about its business of intrigue or its work of tilling the fields, as though nothing unusual had happened. The distinction between such events here and in Russia should be borne in mind by one trying to estimate their significance. In Korea there is no immediate tangible interest, affecting life, liberty, or property, for the individual, at stake, to justify violence. Where the real reasons are not thoroughly selfish and corrupt—as indeed in most cases they are—a misguided patriotism, with a large mixture of hypocritical sentimentality, is the motive for the political murders of Korea. The real patriots, if their feeling is intense enough and their courage sufficient, commit suicide; and those of less degree of intensity refuse to accept office under a foreign protectorate!