CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION ON CHINA AND THE CHINESE Cornell University Library DS 916.M38 Japan's attempt to exterminate Korean Ch 3 1924 023 276 334 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924023276334 Japan's Attempt to Exterminate Korean Christians BY NEWELL MARTIN [Fifth Printing] This letter was referred to in the speech of Hon. George W. Norris, of Nebraska, on the Treaty of Peace with Germany, in the Senate of the United States, October lo, ii and 13, 1919, and is printed in the Congressional Record, October 14, 1919, Vol. 58, No. 120, page 7322. MILFORD. CONNECTICUT 1919 TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Our Sources of Information ...... 3 Praise of Japan ......... 5 Japanese Ambition . . ...... 7 Punctilious Observance of Treaties a Specialty of Japan . 7 Policemen's Fun ........ 8 Stamping Out Christians ........ 8 Machinery of Torture ........ 12 Story of the Pregnant Woman ...... 12 The Naked Widow and the Gay Lunch ..... 13 Twelve Naked Methodist Women ...... 13 Story of a Young School-Girl 14 Kim's Torture .......... 15 Chopping Up a. Christian ...... .15 Discouraging Christianity ....... 15 Four Christian Students Scourged on the Cross ... 16 Massacre of Cheamni ...... 16 Stench of Burning Flesh 17 Night Razzia on a Christian Village . . . 17 Various Styles of Massacre 17 Comforting a Christian's Mother 18 Reverence for Gray Hairs .... . . 18 The Governor-General ........ 19 The Japanese Terrorize Korean Christians .... 19 Their Object is to Terrorize Chinese Christians ... 20 "Cordial" Messages to the Japanese Government ... 23 Hara's "Reforms" ......... 21 Nine Christian Boys. Read This Aloud at Famiily Prayers . 23 Suggestion for Diplomatic Action ...... 25 Make no League with Hell . 26 John Milton's Prayer . . 26 The American's Prayer .... 26 Faithful's Death ... 27 Old Pagan is not Dead .... ... 28 A Christian's Vow 28 \10 TO ANY AMERICANS WHO ARE PREJUDICED AGAINST THE USE OF TORTURE AS A MEANS OF RELIGIOUS PERSUASION : For the Korean Christians no relief or remedy can be seen on this side of eternity. My prayer is that your hea,rts may be touched, so that none of those that hear me may consent to the sin of giving over Chinese Christians to the tormentors. If you had lived during the rise of the Dutch Republic, would you, for any political profit, great or small, have sold the Netherlands to the Spanish Inquisition? In those days of manly faith and honor what English statesman could have debated, even in his mind, the expediency of so dark a trea- son? In this letter is nothing new. In his "Mastery of the Far East," and in his short, clear article in "Asia" for September, Dr. Arthur Judson Brown has told how Japan already intim- idates and degrades the Shan-tung Christians and a certain little brown pamphlet has already set forth the few examples of persecution in Korea here given. That pamphlet (certain pages of which I shall refer to thus, "P. 30") is entitled "'The Korean Situation: Authentic Accounts of Recent Events." The price is 25 cents. It was issued in August by The Commission on Relations with the Orient of the Federal Council of the Church of Christ in America, 105 East 22d Street, New York City. The foreword is signed by William I. Haven, Chairman, and Sidney L. Gn- lick. Secretary. The latter is widely known as a powerful propagandist for Japan. So much of the pamphlet as Is written by him and Dr. Haven shows an intense desire to keep the laity quiet and a deplorable eagerness to persuade us that butter will not melt in the mouth of a Japanese tor- turer. The pamphlet is, obviously, issued reluctantly, under pressure of persistent inquiry from missionaries and other Christians. The statements of fact in that pamphlet are not like tales of atrocity told by refugees, in places of safety, against a distant 3 ■enemy. They are statements made in secret, in the hope of bringing some sort of relief. Both victim and report- ing missionary are still in the awful grip of the oppressor. Neither can hope to profit by falsehood or exaggeration. All American missionaries, indeed, have many times been sternly warned, by their superiors that it will be worse for them if they mislead the home office by any exaggeration or show of sympathy with any opposition to authority. Published with reluctance by an advocate of the Japanese •Government, the statements of fact tucked away in that pamphlet have more than the weight of charges against that Government. They are the unwilling confessions of its ■friends. The first five pages of that brown pamphlet make uninten- tionally a sinister and terrifying revelation of Japan's hidden iand in America. The problem before Tokio was: (1) to blast Korea with a sudden flame of persecution, so that no crop of Christian weeds would ever make head again; (2) to terrify so profoundly all Koreans and Chinese that prudent men would know without ever being told again that in Japanese colonies faith in a crucified Saviour leads straight to a martyr's crown; to heavenly glory perhaps, but to certain earthly shame and ruin; (3) to perfect this advertisement of her heathen power among her slaves before midsummer; (4) and to keep America and Paris ignorant of the Korean terrors. Japan achi€ved these seemingly incompatible triumphs with a skill beyond imagination. She began by choking off such voices as the "Japan Chronicle," the most potent English newspaper in Japan, by a rigid perfection of censorship. But how silence the angry, murmuring Christians of San Francisco and New York? How keep their murmurs from rising to a roar that might reach Paris over the heads of European cen- sors? Any American has cause for grave thought when he learns that all this was foreseen and provided for beforehand as care- fully and completely as were the rawhides and hot irons that tore the flesh of faithful Christians. 4 Who knows by what magic or good luck or supernatural per- ■suasiveness heathen Japan controls the time and manner of publishing or suppressing the most important missionary Tiews since Diocletian's day? Hundreds of pages of facts have been brought through all perils with speed and ■secrecy to the Presbyterian and Methodist mission boards. Published, those horrifying documents would have roused the most complacent priest of our city churches, the meanest ■deacon of us all, and the coldest of our politicians; and the persecutors would have been slowed up or Inconvenienced; and Paris might have denied their prayer for added power. A machinery, however, had been prepared beforehand, and .according to plan, as the Japanese of Europe used to say, the unsuspecting Presbyterians and Methodists poured their facts into the "publicity" department of a "commission" the secre- tary of which is Dr. Sidney L. Gulick, famous for his eulogies •of Japan, many of them entirely just. Those facts were burled forever, then, In the office of a Japanophile enthusiast who -was not less determined than Tokio to keep them from getting about among the Americans or getting to Paris. Dr. Gulick ■called in Japanese officials, who controlled and directed the ■obsequious whispers In which we Christians vented our fiery wrath. Month after month went by, and five months after the persecution broke out. Dr. Gulick's "publicity" department, un- •der pressure, reluctantly printed that brown pamphlet. To kill all possible interest In It, he prefaced it with five pages of Hattery of the Japanese Government and of advice to us to trust ApoUyon to execute all necessary "reforms." Who wish- es to read one single page of these atrocities when assured by Dr. Gulick in the "foreword" that a most efficient govern- ment is doing what we pray for and that the mission boards themselves are content? God will not be content, nor will the Christians of California. Perhaps you have not seen Japanese executioners. I have. .July 6, 1919, was perhaps the very day on which Dr. Gulick was writing his misleading praise of Tokio. Months before that day Dr. Gulick had begun prostrating us in respectful Ttelegrams Ijefore the Mikado's throne. On July 6, In the cap- :ital city of Kore^, a muscular Japanese executioner strips to ■Jiis task again. Tl:e sword-like rawhide whistles through 5 the air, and falls with sickening .force across the bare flesh, of a Christian student. After -ten cruel slashes, delivered with all his might, he is relieved by a second executioner for ten more cuts; and then comes a third, to give ten more. On July 7, once more, three executioners drive the rawhide with full swing and force into the very place that was torn, and gashed yesterday. The boy is again dragged back to his jail. If you were he, lying there, waiting for the next day's torture, would you not pray for death? Or would you, per- haps, curse the day you became a Christian. Or. if you knew whose secret hand was guilty of your torments, would you not curse Gulick? A seventeenth century writer says that it is sport to see a man on the rack for half an hour. There are sadists that skin cats alive. But neither of these sports is so thrilling to amateurs of pain as the torment of the rawhide, and sadists, gather where the police are torturing Christians. On July 8 the boy Is brought out for a third torment and at the first blow, as if the festering wounds were torn open by steel fingers, blood and pus and gobs of Christian flesh fly up and bespatter the laughing bystanders. Thence young Chris- tian goes to the American hospital or to his grave. He is but one of many; how many none will ever know. The persecution has done its deadly work, and now the friends of the persecutors will ask us to trust and admire the new governor-general and his smooth words about gentleness and reform — the purring of the sated tiger. I have no part in trade or politics or missions, but I have a powerful motive for beseeching your attention. Chinese is my native language, and I mourn over the all but hopeless en- slavement of the land where I was born and which I have al- ways loved. From childhood I have hated with an implacable hatred all those that trade in secrecy and all persecutors and torturers. NEWELL JIARTIN. Milford, Connecticut, September, 1919. A PAGAN PERSECUTION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. TEN YEARS AGO THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN BEYOND BELIEF Neither Italy nor the Aegean is so beautiful as Japan, nor is any people more lovable and admirable than the Japanese. Gentlest of men with their own children, fiercest to their foes, these indomitable islanders are aware from a calm observa- tion of facts that they are above common human beings as Hebrews are above Hottentots, but that is no reason why com- mon men should unduly smooth the path of their coming masters. The Japanese have seen how a handful of Biltish have risen to world dominion. The cold-blooded Japanese oligarchs think their own turn should come next. In the relentless pursuit of this unwholesome ambition Japanese politicians have set themselves to possess, enslave, and assimilate Korea and Shan-tung, the two keys of Asia. To the Koreans, only fifteen years ago, they guaranteed in- dependence. Today in Korea it may be death to speak the word. To the Koreans, nine years ago, they guaranteed free- dom of religion. In Korea today to be a Christian is to be in deadly peril. Today, in enslaving the Koreans, the Japanese recklessly degrade themselves and smirch the honor of their race. Like forest fires in a season of drought, atrocities now break forth all over the world, and men become despairingly indif- ferent and wait wearily for the horrors to burn themselves out. But the Japanese atrocities in Korea demand our most intense attention, because: first, pagans are persecuting Chris- tians; secondly, we are using our gigantic power to extend these persecutions to Shan-tung and the rest of northern China; thirdly, these are not war atrocities or civil war atro- cities, and these tales are not scandals invented by a feeble folk to discredit their tyrants, but are the horrors of re- ligious persecution directed against peaceful Christians and unarmed women and children. 7 We begin to understand that in "opening" Japan we playedi the perilous part of the Rash Fisherman of the Arabiam Nights. We unbottled the appalling Afreet whose omnipotent, form now towers to the stars and blackens all the eastern sky. But yesterday we were condescending to these Islanders. To- day, under the dictation of Japanese, our huge nation turns to paths of shame. Imperious, on their tiny islands, they make- cowards of us all. If you are a Japanese policeman, you can have no end of fun. with a Presbyterian school-girl. (P 47) Throw her down, kick her, here and there, hard; drag her to your police court. Beat her about the face and head and legs and back until she- is all blood and tears and shrieks and convulsive sobs. Tell her to show her breasts. When she refuses, tear oft her un- dershirt. Keep her four days, then take her to another prison. There strip her naked; have her "looked at by the men." This- is one of the mildest of the things done in Korea In March of' this year, while the silent, inscrutable, secretive, thoroughly informed envoys of Japan, in Paris, were offering every dip- lomatic courtesy to our commissioners. But for the calm confidence of those Japanese envoys Ini America's submissiveness to Japan that girl today would be- like any New York maiden, securely studying her Bible les- son, and no harm would have come to her from the Japanese^ officials who, with greedy, lecherous eyes, watched her as she^ went by, all faith and hope and maiden modesty. The soldiers- that gloated over her bare body are a part of the forces withi which our own soldiers and engineers are affiliated today ln» northern Asia. In March, 1919, while we were praying daily that the Paris; Conference might lay firm foundations for peace, righteous- ness and freedom, the Japanese Government secretly ordered; its police in Korea to extirpate the Christian religion, whichi used to flourish there and also the modern Korean religion, a^ sort of Sermon-on-the-Mount affair, whose creed begins withj the fantastic proposition. Who waits on God, Will wield God's might. No non-pagan eye but that of the Recording Angel has ever seen that decree. You can infer, however, with scientific accuracy, from the ■acts of Japanese soldiers and police, the orders of their Gov- ernment, more exactly than you can infer from the movement of a man's hand the action of his brain. From those actions we know that the Japanese Government iad directed that the Korean people must be taught by terror that it pays to be a Buddhist, and that it does not pay to be a Christian or to follow the gentle Korean religion or to have ■dealings with American missionaries. The American missionaries had held utterly aloof from poli- tics, but Christianity embarrassed the Japanese Government "because it gave the Koreans an outlook from slavery, a win- dow on the world. You cannot be in the house of even an in- tensely neutral and cautious American missionary without stumbling on incendiary books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or Milton, or John Bunyan. Religious freedom in Korea is guaranteed by solemn treat- ies, but Tokio thinks it no longer necessary to wear any pre- tense about the sanctity of treaties or to make broad any phylacteries. Tokio found its opportunity to get rid of these irksome re ligions in the Korean Declaration of Independence of March 1. Never was so calm a declaration. As a result of skillful secrecy and combination, without the foreknowledge of mis- sionary, priest, or police, all the people of Korea came forth on one day and peacefully declared themselves independent. Their sole object was to inform the Peace Conference of Paris that seventeen millions of Koreans desired to be free. (P. 22). In this outpouring of unarmed multitudes who shouted "Mansay!" (meaning "Hurrah!") there was a natural pre-emin- ence of people of schooling. As a great number of those who have some education belonged to the two doomed religions, this gave the pagan persecutors their chance. The Government resolved to strike terror forever into these Korean Christians, so that never again would they lift their meek faces from under the lash and cry out to mankind. They -were to be taught that it does not pay to be mixed in the re- motest way with Christians or Americans. 9 Such of the declarants as were not shot down at once had gone peacefully home, to wait for Mr. Wilson's Justice, now, they thought, thoroughly advised and aroused. To their homes went spies and gendarmes and police and dragged the Christians away to torment, shame and death. In six weeks Korea was quiet with the stillness of death. Every Korean had learned that if he breathed a word about Americans or Mr. Wilson or freedom, he was to be classed with Christians and meet a Christian's doom. The Christians were swept away like torn paper before a hurricane. We are told of 40,000 arrested and 6,000 killed m the Japanese fury. Not till the graves give up their dead will the number be known exactly. Those figures are probably low. The people of Korea are one sixth of those of the United States. It is doubtful whether even Japanese eflBciency can strike utter ter- ror into so great a population without killing at least one in every 2,000 and arresting six times as many. Some Japanese Torquemada may offer to deny these figures. I will not argue with a murderer as to the number of his victims unless he permits me at least to inspect the cellar where he hides their skeletons. Will you. Prime Minister Hara of Japan, invite an impartial commission to report, from sifted testimony, exact statistics as to how many women have been dishonored, how many maidens put to shame? And what can statistics tell us of the torments of Christians slowly done to death in heathen Jails? Have the Japanese kept record with algometers and registered the sum total of their torments? When Torquemada ruled in Spain, what English Protestant could give statistics of his cruelties? When the Waldenaes went to the stake and the rack, centuries had to pass before the ledgers of the Inquisition were open to the historian. I offer only a few examples of the different kinds of torture and massacre. You may Infer the rest from the dumb terror that now binds all Korea and all Korean Christians. In this persecution the resourceful Japanese use many dif- ferent tortures for the body and, in addition, a torture for the mind that is a sadistic twentieth-century novelty in religious persecution. "A Korean woman," writes a missionary, "would rather die 10 than expose her naked body in ways not conformable to local custom. But It seems to be the common delight of oflScial de- pravity just now to humiliate our Christian women by strip- ping them and beating them while naked." (P. 104.) Ingenious Japanese! Some Korean Christian might dare for himself sword or fire or Damiens' bed of steel; but let him think twice of his wife and daughters put to open shame. The ordinary slaveholder used to be inclined to encourage modesty among his helots as increasing their market value; but the Japanese, in the systematic degradation of his new slaves, finds a profit in breaking down the personal dignity of wives and daughters. No chief of police would have ven- tured of his own accord to adopt such a system of organized Indecency. It was obviously thought out and directed by the controlling brain at Tokio. A government that rests on torture is a government of devils, unfit for even our time. But this Japanese Govern- ment plans carefully the violation of sanctities that lie at the base of civilized society. I remember no other modern government that has deliberately schemed to degrade the un- happy women who are its subjects. There is an unparalleled fiendishness in minds that can thus systematically befoul the purity and modesty of young girls. We might make league and alliance with an inhuman brute and put him in a council to rule over us; but we have some pride in our manhood, some reverence for womanhood, and we will not enter into covenant with a sadist. Of those that were arrested, be they 40,000 or 4,000, or more or fewer, how can we sleep at night when we remember that every pang they suffered earned pleasure, profit, or reward for their tormentors? Of those that died, be they 6,000 or 600, or more or fewer, how many died an easy death? Those that died quickly were the lucky ones. Japanese methods are precise and thorough. Christianity in Japan was stamped out utterly in the seventeenth century. Then, if one Christian was found in any house, from four houses to the right of that house and from four houses to the left every man, woman and child was taken, and died the death. Doubt not that in uprooting Korean Christianity today the Japanese use a similar perfection of method. 11 In the torture of this year, machinery, of course, was some-- times used. One man was squeezed in an upright press. Then, a cord was tied firmly about one finger, and he was hoisted till his toes barely touched the floor. His two crimes were cheering in a procession and receiving a letter from a friend in America and withholding it (P. 45). In his case the Japanese applied an unnecessarily spectacu- lar torture, so as to put another stumbling-block in John Hay's open door by advertising to Koreans and Chinese that it is bad luck to receive letters from America. The best modern tortures, however, need no cumbrous ma- chinery. The grewsome complexities so fashionable in med- ieval Europe were meant to save people from torture by frightening them beforehand. The Japanese held wounded men in prison two days with- out water. Think about that, quietly. They took out of our missionary hospitals men with gunshot wounds, and dragged them away to the horrors of the question (P. 44). "Beating" is a weak word for a strong torment. Beating can easily be made the seventh hell of agony. With a club discreetly used, a Japanese can break the stoutest heart; he^ can in a few minutes drive the strongest to scream and beg. for death. He can do the same thing with three feet of cord. "Beating and torture," writes a missionary, " are the car- dinal principles of Japanese police methods in Korea." "It is usual for the arrested man to be cuffed and kicked, by several policemen" (P. 16). I offer no schedule of cruelties, but I may tell the story of a dozen or more, and you then know the story of t«n thou- sand. 1. The Story of the Pregnant Woman (P. 55). No machin- ery is needed to torture a pregnant woman. This woman had been a mission teacher, "very bright and Intelligent." She was two months advanced in pregnancy. She had gone to the house of one Pyo to comfort the mother, who was distressed because her young daughter had been carried off by the Jap- anese police. "As she came out of the house several police and soldiers came into the yard. They knew she was the. school-teacher and had been searching for her at the school. They told her to come with them. As she stood in front of th3 12 police station, a policeman kicked her hard from behind, an* she fell forward into the room. As she lay, stunned, on the- floor, a policeman put his foot on her head. Then he raise* her up and struck her many times over the head and face." He tore off her clothes, "meanwhile constantly kicking and striking her. He also heat ner with a heavy stick and with a paddle. He tore off her underclothes and kicked her in the- chest and beat her, accusing her of setting the minds of the Korean children against Japan, and said that he intended to beat her to death." "She tried to cover her nakedness with the underclothes, that had been stripped from her," but they were torn away from her. "She tried to sit down, but was forced to rise Dy constant kicking and beating with a stick. She tried to tura away from the many men in the room, but was constantly forced to turn again so as to face the men. She tried to pro- tect herself with her hands and arms, and one man twistedi her arms behind her back and held them there while the beat- ing and kicking continued. All parts of her body were beaten^ She became benumbed and was losing consciousness of pain. Her face swelled and her body became discolored." 2. The Story of the Widow Chung, an attendant of the- Bible Institute (P. 54). She is thirty-one. She was taken into- the office,' and a policeman tore off her underclothes, and she- protested. For this "they struck her in the face" till she was black and blue. She was beaten "systematically on the arms, and legs with a paddle. The beating continued for some time. The police then stopped the beating and sat down to drink, tea and eat Japanese cakes, meanwhile making fun of the: woman sitting there naked. There were many men in the- room." Nor was she the only woman there. The beaten mis- sion-teacher woman was lying naked at the side of the room,, while the tormentors rested and laughed and ate and drank. 3. The Story of the Naked Methodist Women (P. 50). Fit- teen women, twelve of them Methodist and two of them Pres- byterians, w€re held at the Pyengyang police station. One of them, a girl of twenty-one, tells the story: "They stripped all the women naked in the presence of many men. They found nothing against me except that I had been on the street and. had shouted 'Mansey.' They beat me. My arms were pulled 13 tight behind my back and tied. They stuck me with the light- ed end of their cigarettes. Some were stuck with hot irons. My offense was very little compared with those who made flags. "Some were beaten until they were unconscious. One youni; woman was just at the time of her monthly sickness. She re- sisted having her clothes taken off. They tore off her clothing and beat her all the harder. After four days we were taken to the prison. Here we were packed in a room with men and women. One day an old man was beaten until he died. One of the Bible women was right next to him." She asked to be moved away from the corpse, but was denied. "They took our Bibles away and would not allow us to talk or pray." The Jailers "blasphemed the name of Christ," and asked "if there was not a man by the name of Saul who was put in prison.' They asked, most of all, as to what the foreigners had said, and were most vile and cruel to those who had been with the missionaries or who had taught in the mission schools. Some of the girls were so changed that they did not look like per- sons." 4. The Story of a Young Girl (P. 47). "Near the Dok Su Palace a Japanese policeman seized me from behind by my hair and I was thrown to the ground hard." "He kicked me several timgs." "At the entrance of the Chongno police oflSce twenty or more Japanese policemen who stood in line sneered and kicked me and struck me with their swords and struck me in the face many times. I became almost unconscious. My hands and legs were bleeding. "I was led into a room and here they dragged me on the floor. They struck me in the face. They struck me with their swords. They flung me to one corner of the room. On com- ing to my senses -I found myself in a room packed with young men and women. I saw some of them handled so brutally it almost broke my heart to see them beaten." After some time "we were examined by a police officer, one by one. I was made to kneel with my legs bound." Each question and answer was accompanied by "blows in the face." "I was ordered to expose my breasts." "They tied my fingers together and jerked them violently. This made me feel as if my fingers were being torn from my hand." She then tells 14 of her going to the cells. "As I made the first step down, my strength gave out and so I rolled down the whole length of the stairs. I was obliged to crawl Into a room. The police- man in charge was very much amused to see me crawling into the room. He laughed loudly. Then I prayed and seem- ed to see Jesus and was much comforted from on high. I spent five days in all at the police station. Then I was sent to the West Gate Penitentiary. "Theire I was stripped naked and was looked at by the men." 5. The Torturing of One Kim (P. 51). Kim, a young man of promise, a member of the Third City Church of Taiku, was heard by a friend in another cell "to cry out a number of times at the pain of the punishment inflicted on him in the jail." He was frequently beaten on the head with the key of the cell. After his release he suffered terrible pain in his head. "It seemed as if all one side of his head was gone." He died in ten days. "The night he died he was protesting in his delirium that he was innocent and that his punishment was too severe. The doctor who attended him states that he died from blows on the head. The neck and the base of the skull were darkly discolored." 6. Chopping a Christian (P. 43). "A young man was peace- fully going home" (he had, it is true, been shouting "Mansay") and was "walking along a small street" when a policeman from behind threw him down and "drew his sword and hacked at him." "His skull was cut through so that the brain shov\red. This was done by three sword cuts in the same place." The photograph showed ten sword-cuts. "During the next day his little cousin, a mission school girl," who was greatly attached to him "stood watch over his body." 7. The Elder's Wife (P. 34). On March 24 "soldiers look- ing for one of the elders" of a certain church, "took his wife, a bright looking woman of about thirty." "They stripped her of all her clothing and beat her without mercy" to make her tell where her husband was. 8. Official Advice to Christians. One missionary statement runs as follows: "Wholesale arrest and beating of Christians simply because they are Christians. 15 "In some places the men and women of the village were cal- led together. All those who admitted they were Christians ■were maltreated or arrested, and the others sent away. Way- farers met by soldiers and gendarmes are asked whether they -are Christians and beaten and abused on the admission of the fact." Korean Christians surviving "are given all sorts of an- nouncements by local police and gendarmes. They are told that Christianity is to be exterminated ; that all Christians are to be shot, that meetings are to be forbidden." "Throughout the country the police immediately began to arrest pastors, elders and other church officers." A Japanese vice-governor (the real executive of his pro- vince) "in a public meeting advised people to have nothing to •do with Christianity. Police officials are urging the same thing everywhere" (P. 89). "Presbyterians and Methodist organizations are both ob- noxious to the government." 9. Scourged on the Cross (P. 67). Four young theological .students who had taken no part in any demonstration "were found in the college dormitories by Japanese soldiers. Tied to a wooden cross they were given thirty-nine strokes with a paddle and told that, as Christ suffered on the cross, it was ■fitting that they should." 10. The Massacre at Cheamni (P. 74). The village of Cheamni lay only fifteen miles from the railroad by which all tourists used to travel on their way from New York to Peking and from Paris to Tokio. Japanese soldiers were sent there in motor-cars. "The gendarmes and soldiers marching into this village, summoned the men of the village to attend a meeting in the church, where, they were told, certain orders would be read to them." The Japanese gathered in this way about twelve Christian men and about twenty-flve of the Korean religion. As soon as the men had "been gathered together, the soldiers opened fire upon them through the open windows, after having surrounded the building. To complete their work, the surviving women ■of the village told the missionaries, the soldiery entered the building and bayoneted all the men whom the bullets had not killed, while two women who had approached the building to 16 learn the fate of their husbands were bayoneted and their bodies thrown among those of the men. Then Icerosene was poured upon the dead and the bodies and the church build- ing consumed by fire." A missionary who saw the place the next day makes these notes: "Heaps of smoking ashes. Groups of women, chil- dren, and old men sitting on the hillside watching the ruins in dumb despair. Corpse horribly burned lying just outside of a building, which we learned later had been the church. This body was photographed where it lay. I questioned " a villager' but fear and shock had numbed him. He held his head in his hand and said that everything he had and all the results of years of hard work had gone.'' The missionary said, "How is it you are alive?" and he an- swered, "I am not a Christian." These Christians were Methodists. "These people had lost everything, even their seeds for the coming year." Another man said that "his house had not been set on fire because he was not a Christian." The soldiers seem to have belonged to the 78th Regiment. The missionary says that at Cheamni "the odor of burnt flesh" about "the church was sickening." One of the men who accompanied the British consul to this place says: "Whenever we started to talk to the natives" the "police- men would saunter up and the Korean would freeze up." "The number of Christian men killed is twelve, whose names were secured, in addition to which two women who went to find out what was happening to their husbands were killed, one a wo- man over forty and the other nineteen. These may have been the bodies we saw outside the church." Cheamni is a type of one class of burnings and massacres. In that one district fifteen towns were burned. 1,1. A Night Massacre (P. 80). A type of another kind of official burning is Soo Chon, where "the people were awaken- ed by finding their houses on fire. As soon as they ran out they were struck with swords or bayonets or shot." A church and thirty houses were burned. 12. Another Type of Massacre (P. 33). Of massacres we find another type, exemplified in Maungsan, where fifty-six 17 men were summoned to the police station, locked in the pollcR yard and shot down by the police from the top of the wall. The Koreans had heard, as a voice from heaven, the inspir- ing declarations of our President. It was their plan to march, utterly unarmed, and cheer for independence and their native land and to submit to any cruelty. Their whole aim was to tell the outer world of their woes. The outer world finds it profitable to be deaf to their cry, and hurries to put its obse- quious neck under the conqueror's foot, and begs him to ac- cept thirty million new slaves and pass on to fresh conquests. Resolved to use no violence, the Koreans kept themselves un- der firm control to a surprising degree. That was the case even where two women were carried out from a police sta- tion and the crowd of five hundred, that had gathered to pro- test, burst into sobs at the horror of their condition. That was the station where the police olficer explained that, al- though it was not necessary to strip men or old women, girls and young women had to be stripped naked in the search for seditious papers (P. 56). 13. The Story of a Brave Young Man (P. 16). One young man, seeing the girl that he was engaged to in the hands of the police, went to her rescue. How many of us would have had that daring? Between him and that helpless girl stood all the armies of the League of Nations. What do you suppose was done to that young man in the dungeon where he lay when last heard of? 14. The Story of a Man's Mother (P. 34). "The mother of one of the wounded men told a policeman that if her son died she would take revenge.' The policeman went to her house and again stabbed her son who was lying on the floor wound- ed." 15. Respect for Gray Hairs (P. 32). At Suna Ub an old man went to the gendarme station to protest against the atro- cities. In the East reverence is paid to gray hairs and old men can speak up where others fear to tread. "This man the gendarmes shot dead. His wife came in and, finding the body sat down beside it wailing, as is the custom of Korea. She was told to keep still, and not doing so she also was killed." 18 The daughter who came to seejc her aged parents v.as spared, being merely slashed with a sword. This persecution throws light on the part which Japan will take in the League ot Nations. The Governor-General of Korea is close to the heads of the Japanese state and in the closest confidence o£ the court. What he says and what he does are in a high desree the voice and act ot Tokio. The great Ito was resident in Korea. The powerful Terau- chi was governor-general before he became prime minister, preceding Hara, now prime minister. Hasegawa succeeded Terauchi as governor-general. We may expect Hasegawa in a short time to rule over us as Japan's representative in the Council of the Big Five. This governor-general made a proclamation reminding the Koreans, with a view to letting them understand that there is no hope from any quarter, that Japan is "one of the prin- cipal factors in the League of Nations." He exhorted Kore- ans "to participate in the great work of humanity and righte- ousness" pf Japan "as one of the leading powers of the world" (P. 109). Lovers of the League of Nations, which this governor-gen- eral describes so accurately, will be pleased to know what is done in this governor-general's house. Pak Tun Nak, aged twenty-five, met with all the other peo- ple of this village at the end of March and without violence. They paraded the village calling "Mansay." Gendarmes told them to go home. This they did, and that day there was no trouble. Five days later gendarmes went from house to house arresting people. Pak Tun Nak and many others were taken to the governor-general's and flogged. He received thirty strokes at 12 o'clock and thirty at 2 o'clock. He was taken lu the- iiiiES.cnar; hospital (P. 41). A government school-girl says: "On March 1, at two, we went to the French Consulate and the American Consulate and shouted 'Mansay.' We pressed forward to the Governor- General's, and there the Kotang Koan (high official) 'came out with his sword, beating all in his way. He struck me with his sword on the back, making a wound three inches lons- 19 The force of the blow threw me down, after which he stampeJ on my head with his foot' " (P. 82). Poor little lamb! Shouting her cry for freedom before France and England and before the august Governor-General who stands for the might of the League of Nations! A peculiar gravity attends the Korean terrorizing. It has a two-fold object. It is to terrify the Koreans into silence; it is also to terrify Japan's new Chinese subjects into silence. When Japan moves in China, she wishes to hear no protests and to be bothered with no Christians. The prudent Chinese study the reports on Korea and will hasten to avoid being mixed up in any way with Christians and Americans. The prestige of Christianity and of America is gone and Hara is content. One would suppose that at the first offense the near- est missionary could go to the polished governor-general and through him and the polished Viscount Uchida cable all the facts to New York and Paris. Nobody dares to mail even sealed letters from Korea about these crimes. Japan controlled the mails and telegraphs. America, there- fore, could hear nothing of these atrocities. America meekly waits for such news from Asia as Japan thinks wholesome for her weak mind. The Peace Conference was sitting, and we in our homes were invoking divine light and guidance for its counsels. The facts about Korea were essential to aid our President in deciding whether he should award the thirty million of Shan-tung to the cruel task-masters that hold the whip over the seventeen millions of Korea. If we had made any prom- ise, it would be void because of the concealment of these ma- terial facts about the policy and conduct of the men to whom we awarded Shan-tung. A missionary came to New York, a messenger, as if we were back in the days of Erasmus. Messengers, with documents hidden about their clothes, made their way out of Korea. In a famous painting, "The Missionary's Story," a shabby priest tries to tell an absent-minded cardinal what the pagaa wolves have done to the lambs of his flock. I fear that some of the officers of the great mission boards were alarmed when they heard this Korean missionary's story lest the American people might hear what should fire the coldest heart. Who,, 20 "With the smell of burning Christian tfesh in fils nostril's, courd" vote for Governor-General Hasegawa and his League of Na- tions ? The Commission on Relations with the Orient which oi>- erates as a brake on the mission boards has consistently fol- lowed the policy, in which it has been skilfully seconded by the press, of keeping everything quiet and keeping everybody cool. There are indications that some of the hierarchy of our Pro- testant churches have been misled by Japanese diplomatists, into believing that everything should be hushed up that may diminish the popular demand for a League of Nations and for a permanent alliance between our Government and that of Japan. On April 16, 19.19, the mission boards called a meeting of that commission of the sesquipedalian name. To two cif such meetings "Important Japanese were Invited. "Urgent and full cablegrams" were promptly sent to Japan, by some of these "Japanese friends." The commission sought hy these "quiet and friendly meth- ods" to exert influence. "It deemed it only fair and just to. take up the matter first with the Japanese," "before giving to the daily press the rapidly accumulating matter from Korea." Under pressure from anxious inquiring Christians, that com- mission scrambled together such papers as they could no lon- ger withhold, and printed them in the little brown pamphlet, of 125 pages referred to in the preface, entitled "The Korean Situation." That pamphlet begins by saying that "many exaggerations have been circulated." It says that "there is good ground for belief that even before the uprising" — "uprising" is a strange word to describe the Korean s peaceful protest — "the present cabinet" "was earnestly grappling with the problem of ad- ministrative reform in Korea" and that "there is every reason . to believe that Premier Hara and his colleagues will exert their fullest power to rectify the wrongs and inaugurate a new era in Korea." The facts set forth here have been dug out of that pamph- - let. You may rest assured, then, that these notes contain < none of the "exaggerations" deplored by the Rev. Dr. Gulick. 21 How much effort has been made by the press and the com- ■'mission to awaken and inform the public you may infer from the amount of information that you yourself had in regard to 'the Korean atrocities before reading these notes. Viscount Uchida will smile and say, "You ask Americans to roe more royalist than the king, to be more zealous against ■pagan cruelty than the mission boards." Let me remind yoa that there was once a mission board in London that derived revenue from the African slave-trade, 'Caesar's image and superscription go a long way with a mis- ;sion board, but when I hear of Christian maidens dishonored, •Christian men with their finger-nails torn up by torturers, •Christian women tormented to make them betray their hus- ibands, I need no cautious clergyman or prudent prelate to tell me what to think or what to say. The mission boards are made up of earnest, honest, able, learned men, devoted to spreading the gospel. In every boari are ardent servants of God who plead with the board to maks no bargain with such Japanese oflScials as are even now forc- ing morphine on Shan-tung and always there is some unprac- tical zealot, like John Brown of Ossawatomie, who feels on his own back every lash that tears the flesh of a Christian slave. But boards of directors bank and cool all apostolic fires. Six mission boards, acting through a commission, op- erate as a freezing mixture on righteous indignation. After i-agged martyrs have told their tale, the chilly voice of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is heard, advising pliancy and the concilia- tion of the powers of darkness. On April 20 a cablegram was sent to Viscount Uchida, Min- ister of Foreign Affairs. We can infer from the answer that it was "cordial and friendly" and that the commission de- clared itself "moderate." The commission seems pleased with the answer they received. In that Hara, while acknowledgin.? Xhe obsequious attitude of the commission, coldly threatens »that any publicity, any excitement, any denunciation In the ■press, will "seriously interfere" with his "reforms." In other -swords, more torture, more massacre, unless you are silent un- ^^de^ the whip. What Premier Hara means is: not one wor-l Vtrom you Americans until we have carried our point at Paris -and secured a free hand in China. When we Japanese have 22 stamped out Korean Christianity we may, later, grant you some "reforms." The Premier Hara who said, in answer to the mission boards, that he was laboring on reforms is the same Hara who, on August 27, 1919, said: "Japan has no ambitious de- signs against China. The Ministry is urgently advocating closer friendly relations. The day will arrive when China will come to comprehend the sincerity of Japan." Korea and, I hope, some Americans, already understand the sincerity of Japan. On April 20 the "cordial and friendly" telegram was sent to Viscount XJchida, which elicited the information that "Premier Hara is now in the midst of special investigations for the real- ization of reforms" and his threat. The Americans and the American press were humble and silent. Let me describe some of the activities of a liberal Japanese premier "in the midst of" plans for "reform." On April 19, 1919, Mowry, American missionary, innocent ot any knowledge of the agitation, was sentenced to six months at hard labor. On April 24 a missionary writes, "Since the coming in of fresh troops and the inauguration of 'more severe' methods of repression as announced by the government, increasing numbers of reports come in regarding the violation of women by the soldiers." "The absence of this form of violence in the past" and "the sudden appearance of such reports coincident with the new order" — these things fit together. "The reports . . . come from trustworthy sources. Complaint made to the police in regard to this has been met by beating" (P. 85, 101). On April 26 a missionary writes: "The Kwak San church burned yesterday morning. Atrocious tortures of prisoners in Tyung Ja." On April 30 a missionary writes that Christian refuge«