On the subject of Finance there is little to be said. The principal items of revenue are a land tax of six dollars on a fertile _kyel_, and five dollars on a mountain _kyel_, a house tax of 60 cents annually, from which houses in the capital are exempt, the ginseng tax, and the gold dues, making up a budget of about 4,000,000 dollars, a sum amply sufficient for the legitimate expenditure of the country. The land tax is extremely light. Only about a third of the revenue actually collected reaches the National Treasury, partly owing to the infinite corruption of the officials through whose hands it passes, and partly because provincial income and expenditure are to a certain extent left to local management. If the Government is in earnest in the all-important matter of educating the people, the increased expenditure can readily be met by imposing taxation on such articles of luxury as wine and tobacco, which are enormously consumed, Seoul alone possessing 475 wine shops and 1,100 tobacco shops. But even without resorting to any new source of revenue, with strict supervision and regular accounts the income of the Central Government is capable of considerable expansion. In spite of the awful official corruption which has been revealed, and the chaos which up to 1896 prevailed in the Treasury, the Korean financial outlook is a hopeful one. At the close of 1895 the King persuaded Mr. M’Leavy Brown, LL.D., the Chief Commissioner of Customs, to undertake the thankless office of Adviser to the Treasury, confirming his position some months later by the issue of an edict making his signature essential to all orders for payments out of the national purse. Korean imagination and ingenuity are chiefly fertile in devising tricks and devices for getting hold of public money, and anything more hydra-headed than the dishonesty of Korean official life cannot be found, so that it is not surprising that as soon as the foreign adviser blocks one nefarious proceeding another is sprung upon him, and that the army of useless drones, deprived of their “vested interests” by the judicious retrenchments which have been made, as well as thousands who are trembling for their ill-gotten gains, should oppose financial reform by every device of Oriental ingenuity.