The next great step in the Japanese advance was the acquirement of the entire Korean postal and telegraph system.  This was taken over, despite Korean protests.  More and more Japanese gendarmes were brought in and established themselves everywhere.  They started to control all political activity.  Men who protested against Japanese action were arrested and imprisoned, or driven abroad.  A notorious pro-Japanese society, the II Chin Hoi, was fostered by every possible means, members receiving for a time direct payments through Japanese sources.  The payment at one period was 50 sen (1s.) a day.  Notices were posted in Seoul that no one could organize a political society unless the Japanese headquarters consented, and no one could hold a meeting for discussing affairs without permission, and without having it guarded by Japanese police.  All letters and circulars issued by political societies were first to be submitted to the headquarters.  Those who offended made themselves punishable by martial law.

Gradually the hand of Japan became heavier and heavier.  Little aggravating changes were made.  The Japanese military authorities decreed that Japanese time should be used for all public work, and they changed the names of the towns from Korean to Japanese.  Martial law was now enforced with the utmost rigidity.  Scores of thousands of Japanese coolies poured into the country, and spread abroad, acting in a most oppressive way.  These coolies, who had been kept strictly under discipline in their own land, here found themselves masters of a weaker people.  The Korean magistrates could not punish them, and the few Japanese residents, scattered in the provinces, would not.  The coolies were poor, uneducated, strong, and with the inherited brutal traditions of generations of their ancestors who had looked upon force and strength as supreme right.  They went through the country like a plague.  If they wanted a thing they took it If they fancied a house, they turned the resident out.

They beat, they outraged, they murdered in a way and on a scale of which it is difficult for any white man to speak with moderation.  Koreans were flogged to death for offences that did not deserve a sixpenny fine.  They were shot for mere awkwardness.  Men were dispossessed of their homes by every form of guile and trickery.  It was my lot to hear from Koreans themselves and from white men living in the districts, hundreds upon hundreds of incidents of this time, all to the same effect.  The outrages were allowed to pass unpunished and unheeded.  The Korean who approached the office of a Japanese resident to complain was thrown out, as a rule, by the underlings.

One act on the part of the Japanese surprised most of those who knew them best.  In Japan itself opium-smoking is prohibited under the heaviest penalties, and elaborate precautions are taken to shut opium in any of its forms out of the country.  Strict anti-opium laws were also enforced in Korea under the old administration.  The Japanese, however, now permitted numbers of their people to travel through the interior of Korea selling morphia to the natives.  In the northwest in particular this caused quite a wave of morphia-mania.