The Independents were determined to have genuine reform, and the mass of the people were still behind them.  The Conservatives, who opposed them, now controlled practically all official actions.  The Independence Club started a popular agitation, and for months Seoul was in a ferment.  Great meetings of the people continued day after day, the shops closing that all might attend.  Even the women stirred from their retirement, and held meetings of their own to plead for change.  To counteract this movement, the Conservative party revived and called to its aid an old secret society, the Pedlars’ Guild, which had in the past been a useful agent for reaction.  The Cabinet promised fair things, and various nominal reforms were outlined.  The Independents’ demands were, in the main, the absence of foreign control, care in granting foreign concessions, public trial of important offenders, honesty in State finance, and justice for all.  In the end, another demand was added to these—­that a popular representative tribunal should be elected.

When the Pedlars’ Guild had organized its forces, the King commanded the disbandment of the Independence Club.  The Independents retorted by going en bloc to the police headquarters, and asking to be arrested.  Early in November, 1898, seventeen of the Independent leaders were thrown into prison, and would have been put to death but for public clamour.  The people rose and held a series of such angry demonstrations that, at the end of five days, the leaders were released.

The Government now, to quiet the people, gave assurances that genuine reforms would be instituted.  When the mobs settled down, reform was again shelved.  On one occasion, when the citizens of Seoul crowded into the main thoroughfare to renew their demands, the police were ordered to attack them with swords and destroy them.  They refused to obey, and threw off their badges, saying that the cause of the people was their cause.  The soldiers under foreign officers, however, had no hesitation in carrying out the Imperial commands.  As a next move, many thousands of men, acting on an old national custom, went to the front of the palace and sat there in silence day and night for fourteen days.  In Korea this is the most impressive of all ways of demonstrating the wrath of the nation, and it greatly embarrassed the Court.

The Pedlars’ Guild was assembled in another part of the city, to make a counter demonstration.  Early in the morning, when the Independents were numerically at their weakest, the Pedlars attacked them and drove them off.  On attempting to return they found the way barred by police.  Fight after fight occurred during the next few days between the popular party and the Conservatives, and then, to bring peace, the Emperor promised his people a general audience in front of the palace.  The meeting took place amid every surrounding that could lend it solemnity.  The foreign representatives and the heads of the Government were in attendance.  The Emperor, who stood on a specially built platform, received the leaders of the Independents, and listened to their statement of their case.  They asked that the monarch should keep some of his old promises to maintain the national integrity and do justice.  The Emperor, in reply, presented them with a formal document, in which he agreed to their main demands.