“I have seen personal friends of mine among the Koreans, educated men, middle-aged men, who up to that time had no part in the demonstrations, parts of whose bodies had been beaten to a pulp under police orders.

“A few hundred yards from where I am writing, the beating goes on, day after day.  The victims are tied down on a frame and beaten on the naked body with rods till they become unconscious.  Then cold water is poured on them until they revive, when the process is repeated.  It is sometimes repeated many times.  Reliable information comes to me that in some cases arms and legs have been broken.

     “Men, women and children are shot down or bayonetted.  The
     Christian church is specially chosen as an object of fury, and to
     the Christians is meted out special severity....

“A few miles from here, a band of soldiers entered a village and ordered the men to leave, the women to remain behind.  But the men were afraid to leave their women, and sent the women away first.  For this the men were beaten.

“A short distance from this village, this band is reported to have met a Korean woman riding in a rickshaw.  She was violated by four of the soldiers and left unconscious.  A Korean reported the doings of this band of soldiers to the military commander of the district in which it occurred and the commander ordered him to be beaten for reporting it.

“Word comes to me to-day from another province of a woman who was stripped and strung up by the thumbs for six hours in an effort to get her to tell the whereabouts of her husband.  She probably did not know.

“The woes of Belgium under German domination have filled our ears for the past four years, and rightly so.  The Belgian Government has recently announced that during the more than four years that the Germans held the country, six thousand civilians were put to death by the Germans.  Here in this land it is probably safe to say that two thousand men, women and children, empty handed and helpless, have been put to death in seven weeks.  You may draw your own conclusions!

“As for the Koreans, they are a marvel to us all.  Even those of us who have known them for many years, and have believed them to be capable of great things, were surprised.  Their self-restraint, their fortitude, their endurance and their heroism have seldom been surpassed.  As an American I have been accustomed to hear, as a boy, of the ‘spirit of 76,’ but I have seen it out here, and it was under a yellow skin.  More than one foreigner is saying, these days, ‘I am proud of the Koreans.’”

There were exciting scenes in Sun-chon.  This city is one of the great centres of Christianity in Korea, and its people, hardy and independent northerners, have for long been suspected by the Japanese.  Large numbers of leaders of the church and students at the missionary academy had been arrested, confined for a very long period and ill-treated at the time of the Conspiracy trial.  They were all found to be innocent later, on the retrial at the Appeal Court.  This had not tended to promote harmonious relations between the two peoples.