We need not tarry to repeat the story already told of the strong internal opposition that the moderate Korean policy of the government had aroused in Japan, and of its far-reaching consequences in her domestic politics. What mainly interests us here is the question as to what effect did the treaty produce upon Korea herself, whose sovereignty it recognized in unmistakable terms. This conventional independence of Korea had hardly altered the state of her political mind. Korea, it should always be remembered, had since prehistoric ages been trained in that school of experience in which she found herself eking out her bare existence between stronger surrounding nations, which she was wont either to propitiate or to set one against another for her precarious safety. The Koreans had thus by habit and by conviction grown up an opportunist nation. They gratified Japan by complying with her wish to declare them independent, while, at the same time, they courted China's favor by maintaining their vague dependency upon that empire. As indefinitely did China support her contention that Korea at once was and was not dependent upon her. The time soon came, however, when China was obliged to define her position toward Korea, for the more apparent Japan's policy of upholding Korean independence became to China, the more urgent was it for the latter to reassert her suzerainty over the peninsula. The ambiguous phraseology with which China had masked herself was suddenly cast aside when an acute crisis came. In 1882 Tai-wen-kun, the father of the Korean king, assumed the administrative power at Seul, and set about executing with great rigor his anti-foreign policy. The old patriot believed, like many a Japanese before the restoration, that exclusion and independence were synonymous. On April 23 the Japanese legation was attacked by Korean troops, its twenty-seven members barely escaping to Japan by way of Chemulpo on an English vessel. With unusual rapidity the Peking government sent forces to Korea, who captured Tai-wen-kun and carried him off to China, demonstrating in this way the latter's assumed right of forcible intervention in Korea. China thus asserted by deed her suzerainty over Korea, and herein is already forecast an ultimate conflict between her and Japan, although neither power may have expected it as yet. Japan, on her part, contented herself by securing the punishment of the guilty, payment of 50,000 _yen_ for the killed and wounded, and also an indemnity amounting to half a million _yen_, four-fifths of which were remitted the next year. She was, besides, allowed to station troops at Seul for protecting her residents against future emergencies.