The cleansing of the Augean stable of the Korean official system, which the Japanese had undertaken, was indeed an Herculean labor. Traditions of honor and honesty, if they ever existed, had been forgotten for centuries. Standards of official rectitude were unknown. In Korea when the Japanese undertook the work of reform there were but two classes, the robbers and the robbed, and the robbers included the vast army which constituted officialdom. “Squeezing” and peculation were the rule from the highest to the lowest, and every position was bought and sold. The transition stage, down to 12th February, 1895, when I left Korea, was a remarkable one. The _Official Gazette_ curiously reflected that singular period. One day a decree abolished the 3 feet long tobacco pipes which were the delight of the Koreans of the capital; another, there was an enlightened statute ordering the planting of pines to remedy the denudation of the hills around Seoul, the same _Gazette_ directing that duly appointed geomancers should find “an auspicious day” on which the King might worship at the ancestral tablets! One day barbarous and brutalizing punishments were wisely abolished; another, there appeared a string of vexatious and petty regulations calculated to harass the Chinese out of the kingdom, and appointing as a punishment for the breach of them a fine of 100 dollars or 100 blows! Failure in tact was one great fault of the Japanese. The seizure of the Palace and the King’s person in July, 1894, even if a dubious political necessity, did not excuse the indignities to which the sovereign was exposed. The forcing of former conspirators into high office was a grave error, and tactless proceedings, such as the abolition of long pipes, alterations in Court and other dress, many interferences with social customs, and petty and harassing restrictions and regulations, embittered the people against the new _régime_. The Tong-haks, who had respectfully thrown off allegiance to the King on the ground that he was in the hands of foreigners, and had appointed another sovereign, had been vanquished early in January, and their king’s head had been sent to Seoul by a loyal governor. There I saw it in the busiest part of the Peking Road, a bustling market outside the “little West Gate,” hanging from a rude arrangement of three sticks like a camp-kettle stand, with another head below it. Both faces wore a calm, almost dignified, expression. Not far off two more heads had been exposed in a similar frame, but it had given way, and they lay in the dust of the roadway, much gnawed by dogs at the back. The last agony was stiffened on their features. A turnip lay beside them, and some small children cut pieces from it and presented them mockingly to the blackened mouths. This brutalizing spectacle had existed for a week.