Agreements with China cancelled. Distinctions between Patrician and Plebeian abolished. Slavery abolished. Early Marriages prohibited. Remarriage of widows permitted. Bribery to be strictly forbidden. No one to be arrested without warrant for civil offences. Couriers, mountebanks, and butchers no longer to be under degradation. Local Councils to be established. New coinage issued. Organization of Police force. No one to be punished without trial. Irregular taxation by Provincial Governments forbidden. Extortion of money by officials forbidden. Family of a criminal not to be involved in his doom. Great modifications as to torture. Superfluous Paraphernalia abolished. School of Instruction in Vaccination. Hair-cropping Proclamation. Solar Calendar adopted. “Drilled Troops” (_Kun-ren-tai_) abolished. Legal punishments defined. Slaughter-Houses licensed. Committee of Legal Revision appointed. Telegraph Regulations. Postal Regulations. Railways placed under Bureau of Communications. These ordinances are a selection from among several hundred promulgated since July, 1894. Of the reforms notified during the last three and a half years several have not taken effect; and concerning others there has been a distinctly retrograde movement, with a tendency to revert to the abuses of the old _régime_; and others which were taken in hand earnestly, have gradually collapsed, owing in part to the limpness of the Korean character, and in part to the opposition of all in office and of all who hope for office to any measures of reform. Some, admirable in themselves, at present exist only on paper; but, on the whole, the reorganized system, though in many respects fragmentary, is a great improvement on the old one; and it may not unreasonably be hoped that the young men, who are now being educated in enlightened ideas and notions of honor, will not repeat the iniquities of their fathers. FOOTNOTES: [43] The chapters on the Reorganized Korean Government--Education, Trade, and Finance--and Dæmonism are intended to aid in the intelligent understanding of those which precede them. The reader who wishes to go into the subject of the old and the reorganized systems of Korean Government will find a mass of curious and deeply interesting detail in a volume entitled, _Korean Government_, by W. H. Wilkinson, Esq., lately H.B.M.’s Acting Vice-Consul at Chemulpo, published by the Statistical Department of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs at Shanghai in March, 1897. To it I am very greatly indebted. [44] Wood-day is the term adopted by the Japanese for Thursday, their week, which has now been imposed on the Koreans, being Sun-day, Moon-day, Fire-day, Water-day, Wood-day, Metal-day, and Earth-day. [45] See p. 250.