semi-official Japanese statement that their Minister and his troops had
gone to the palace at the King's request, to defend him, made the matter
rather worse.

The affair would have been more quickly forgotten but for the overbearing
attitude of Japanese settlers towards the Korean people, and of Japanese
Ministers towards the Korean Government. Officially they advanced claims so
unjust that they aroused the protest of other foreigners. The attitude of
the Japanese settlers was summed up by Lord (then the Hon. G.N.) Curzon,
the famous British statesman, after a visit in the early nineties. "The
race hatred between Koreans and Japanese," he wrote, "is the most striking
phenomenon in contemporary Chosen. Civil and obliging in their own country,
the Japanese develop in Korea a faculty for bullying and bluster that is
the result partly of nation vanity, partly of memories of the past. The
lower orders ill-treat the Koreans on every possible opportunity, and are
cordially detested by them in return."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Problems of the Far East," London, 1894.]

The old Regent returned from China in 1885, to find his power largely gone,
at least so far as the Court was concerned. But he still had friends and
adherents scattered all over the country. Furious with the Chinese for his
arrest and imprisonment, he threw himself into the arms of the Japanese.
They found in him a very useful instrument.

Korea has for centuries been a land of secret societies. A new society now
sprang up, and spread with amazing rapidity, the Tong-haks. It was
anti-foreign and anti-Christian, and Europeans were at first inclined to
regard it in the same light as Europeans in China later on regarded the
Boxers. But looking back at it to-day it is impossible to deny that there