Reports were beginning to come in from other parts.  There had been demonstrations throughout the north, right up to Wiju, on the Manchurian border.  At Song-chon, it was reported, thirty had been killed, a number wounded, and three hundred arrested Pyeng-yang had been the centre of a particularly impressive movement, which had been sternly repressed.  From the east coast, away at Hameung, there came similar tidings.  The Japanese stated that things were quiet in the south until Wednesday, when there was an outbreak at Kun-san, led by the pupils of a Christian school.  The Japanese at once seized on the participation of the Christians, the press declaring that the American missionaries were at the bottom of it.  A deliberate attempt was made to stir up the Japanese population against the Americans.  Numbers of houses of American missionaries and leaders of philanthropic work were searched.  Several of them were called to the police offices and examined; some were stopped in the streets and searched.  Unable to find any evidence against the missionaries, the Japanese turned on the Korean Christians.  Soon nearly every Korean Christian pastor in Seoul was in jail; and news came from many parts of the burning of churches, the arrest of leading Christians, and the flogging of their congregations.  The Japanese authorities, on pressure from the American consular officials, issued statements that the missionaries had nothing to do with the uprising, but in practice they acted as though the rising were essentially a Christian movement.

In the country people were stopped by soldiers when walking along the roads, and asked, “Are you Christians?” If they answered, “Yes,” they were beaten; if “No,” they were allowed to go.  The local gendarmes told the people in many villages that Christianity was to be wiped out and all Christians shot.  “Christians are being arrested wholesale and beaten simply because they are Christians,” came the reports from many parts.

Soon dreadful stories came from the prisons, not only in Seoul, but in many other parts.  Men who had been released after investigation, as innocent, told of the tortures inflicted on them in the police offices, and showed their jellied and blackened flesh in proof.  Some were even inconsiderate enough to die a few days after release, and on examination their bodies and heads were found horribly damaged.  The treatment may be summed up in a paragraph from a statement by the Rev. A.E.  Armstrong, of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, who was on a visit to Korea at the time: 

“The tortures which the Koreans suffer at the hands of the police and gendarmes are identical with those employed in the famous conspiracy trials.  I read affidavits, now on their way to the United States and British Governments, which made one’s blood boil, so frightful were the means used in trying to extort confessions from prisoners.  And many of these had no part