The Emperor at first was reported to have attacks of being “indisposed,” which prevented his seeing the Ministers when they came for consultation, or for the imperial sanction to their acts under the new _régime_. But, on the whole, his health gradually so improved that he was able to accept the situation with more apparent acquiescence, if not inner complacency. And the fright which soon arose over the serious consequences that were to follow his alleged Commission of Koreans and their “foreign friend” to enter formal protest against Japan at The Hague Peace Conference, at least for the time being made the humiliations suffered from his own subjects at home the easier to be borne. According to unfailing Korean custom, it was to be expected that the ex-Ministers would become at once opponents of their successors in office and powerful factors in the intrigues designed to destroy the influence of the latter with the Emperor. The success of the new Ministry, especially in the matter of those reforms which made Marquis Ito’s administration so obnoxious to the ruling classes, was therefore in peril from the Ministry that had resigned. But influence of a private and suspicious character with His Majesty had become, under the new _régime_, less important and less likely to be profitable; and the ex-Ministers were not only to be rendered innocuous, even if any of them might at any time be disposed to do harm, but were also themselves to be committed by motives of personal interest to a more responsible, relatively reformed mode of administering national affairs. The new Korean Government decided to “create” the office of “Councillor in the Privy Council”; the ex-Ministers were themselves promptly appointed to this office. They were given comfortable salaries, and three of them—including the one who had been publicly reported as having put on a coat-of-mail and secreted himself in his own house, through fear of assassination, at the time of his resignation—were sent on a tour of inspection to Japan. Here they were received in audience by His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan, and so well treated that they might reasonably be expected to return to their own country with a spirit of hearty co-operation in measures for reforming the condition of their own country after the Japanese model.