“Do you beat an old man, seventy years old, this way?” called the older man.

“What is seventy years, you rascal of a Christian?” came the reply.

The police took the names of the Christians from the church roll, and went round the village, picking them out and beating them all, men, women and children.  They killed their dogs.  The non-Christians were let alone.

On the afternoon of April 4th a cordon of police and gendarmes was suddenly picketed all around the missionary quarter in Pyeng-yang, and officials, police and detectives made an elaborate search of the houses.  Some copies of an Independence newspaper, a bit of paper with a statement of the numbers killed at Anju, and a copy of the program of the memorial service were found among the papers of Dr. Moffett’s secretary, and two copies of a mimeographed notice in Korean, thin paper rolled up into a thin ball and thrown away, were found in an outhouse.  The secretary was arrested, bound, beaten and hauled off.  Other Koreans found on the premises were treated in similar fashion.  One man was knocked down, beaten and kicked on the head several times.

Dr. Moffett and the Rev. E.M.  Mowry, another American Presbyterian missionary from Mansfield, Ohio, were ordered to the police office that evening, and cross-examined.  Dr. Moffett convinced the authorities that he knew nothing of the independence movement and had taken no part in it (he felt bound, as a missionary, not to take part in political affairs), but Mr. Mowry was detained on the charge of sheltering Korean agitators.

Mr. Mowry had allowed five Korean students wanted by the police to remain in his house for two days early in March.  Some of them were his students and one was his former secretary; Mr. Mowry was a teacher at the Union Christian College, and principal of both the boys’ and girls’ grammar schools at Pyeng-yang.  Mr. Mowry declared that Koreans often slept at his house, and he had no knowledge that the police were trying to arrest these lads.

The missionary was kept in jail for ten days.  His friends were told that he would probably be sent to Seoul for trial Then he was suddenly brought before the Pyeng-yang court, no time being given for him to obtain counsel, and was sentenced to six months’ penal servitude.  He was led away wearing the prisoners’ cap, a wicker basket, placed over the head and face.

An appeal was at once entered, and eventually the conviction was quashed, and a new trial ordered.

XVII

GIRL MARTYRS FOR LIBERTY

The most extraordinary feature of the uprising of the Korean people is the part taken in it by the girls and women.  Less than twenty years ago, a man might live in Korea for years and never come in contact with a Korean woman of the better classes, never meet her on the street, never see her in the homes of his Korean friends.  I have lived for a week or two at a time, in the old days, in the house of a Korean man of high class, and have never once seen his wife or daughters.  In Japan in those days—­and with many families the same holds true to-day—­when one was invited as a guest, the wife would receive you, bow to the guest and her lord, and then would humbly retire, not sitting to table with the men.