Near the end of the month Korea suffered the misfortune of seeing Count Inouye retire from the Legation in Seoul and return to Japan. Never did the Japanese have such need of a strong and upright man in Seoul and never had a Japanese Minister in Seoul opportunity for greater distinction. There are those who believe that he despaired of accomplishing anything so long as the two opposing factions in Seoul were led by personalities so strong and so implacable in their mutual hatred as the queen and the ex-Regent. It is not unlikely that he felt that until one or other of these should be permanently removed from the field of action there could be no real opportunity for the renovation of Korea. This by no means implies that he desired such removal to be effected by forcible means but it is not unnatural to suppose that he must have given expression to the conviction as to the futility of doing anything under existing conditions in the peninsula. There have been some who have believed that the Japanese authorities in Tokyo determined upon the removal of the obstacle in Seoul by any means in their power. Subsequent events gave some color to this surmise but we cannot and do not believe that the Japanese government was a party to the plot which ended in the tragedy of the following October but that a fanatical and injudicious Japanese Minister to Korea privately gave his sanction to an act which the Japanese government would have sternly forbidden had they been consulted. [Illustration: _THE AMERICAN MINES AT TA-BA-WI._] The summer of 1895 witnessed the first serious epidemic of cholera in Korea since the far more destructive one of 1886. Special plague hospitals were erected in Seoul and in spite of their temporary and inadequate nature the foreign protestant missionaries of Seoul, who were in charge, accomplished very much in the way of local relief. It is impossible to say what the total mortality in Seoul was, to say nothing of the country at large, but it is probable that ten or twelve thousand people died in the Capital before the subsidence of the epidemic.