With imports, European countries, India, and America are concerned. Without, I think, being over sanguine, I anticipate a time when, with improved roads, railroads, and enlightenment, together with security for the earnings of labor from official and patrician exactions, the Korean will have no further occasion for protecting himself by an appearance of squalid poverty, and when he will become on a largely increased scale a consumer as well as a producer, and will surround himself with comforts and luxuries of foreign manufacture, as his brethren are already doing under the happier rule of Russia. Under the improved conditions which it is reasonable to expect, I should not be surprised if the value of the Foreign Trade of Korea were to reach £10,000,000 in another quarter of a century, and the share which England is to have of it is an important question. Our great competitor in the Korean markets is Japan, and we have to deal not only with a rival within twenty hours of Korean shores, and with nearly a monopoly of the carrying trade, but with the most nimble-witted, adaptive, persevering, and pushing people of our day. It is inevitable that British hardware and miscellaneous articles must be ousted by the products of Japanese cheaper labor, and that the Japanese will continue to supply the increasing demand for scissors, knives, matches, needles, hoes, grass knives, soap, perfumes, kerosene lamps, iron cooking-pots, nails, and the like, but the loss of the trade in cotton piece goods would be a serious matter, and the possibility of it has to be faced. The value of the import trade in 1896 was £708,461 as against £875,816 for 1895 (an exceptional year), and the larger part of this reduction took place in articles of British manufacture, the decrease of £134,304 in the value of cotton imports falling almost entirely on cottons of British origin, the Japanese import not only retaining its position in spite of adverse circumstances, but showing a slight increase. Japanese sheetings showed a substantial increase, more than counterbalanced by the diminished import of the British and American article, and Japanese cotton yarn continued to arrive in larger quantities, and is gradually driving British and Indian yarn out of the Korean market. It can be sold at a considerably lower price than the British article, and practically at the same price as the Indian, with which its improved quality enables it to compete on very favorable terms. As the result of inquiries carried on during my two journeys in the interior, as well as at the treaty ports, it does not appear to me that Japanese success is even chiefly caused by proximity, and in 1896 she had to compete with the enterprise and energy of the Chinese, who, having returned after the war to the benefits of British protection, were pushing the distribution of Manchester goods imported from Shanghai.