The date originally fixed for the assassination of the five Ministers was the 1st of the first moon, when all the high dignitaries proceed to the Palace to offer their congratulations to the Emperor. They hired a number of men in Chul-la-do and Kyöng-sang-do for the purpose; but the plan miscarried owing to the belated arrival of these men. The 25th of May was then chosen. Some fifty men came up to town in time from the above two provinces, and five bands, each under the command of a leader, were posted along the roads leading to the Palace from the respective residences of the Premier, Ministers of the Interior, War, Education and Justice, and Mr. Yi Kun-tak. The company commanded by Aw Ki-ho, which was to do away with Mr. Pak, failed through the hesitation of the hired men; but Yi Hong-tai’s company, charged with the killing of the War Minister, had courage enough to make an attempt. Their efforts, however, proved abortive, and led to the detection of the plot. An analysis of this group of Korean officials and commoners, bent on wholesale political murder of their own countrymen in office, because the latter were avowedly committed to a reform of the economical and judicial condition of Korea, without distinction as to the ill success, or even, in certain particular cases, the unfaithfulness of these “reformers” shows it to have been composed of three classes of persons. There were, first, the high-class officials who, with one exception, were themselves at the time among the party of the “outs”; and who undoubtedly found in this fact the chief crime of the Japanese administration against themselves. There were, second, the misguided patriots who, beginning with an honorable but vain unwillingness to admit the incapacity of their country to manage its own affairs, had sunken to the condition of prejudice and hatred which made them plan to murder their own cabinet ministers, because the latter had, however reluctantly, admitted this incapacity and acted accordingly. And there was, third, that basest of all criminals, the cold-blooded, unprincipled, hired assassin.