The news of the signing of the treaty was received by the people with horror and indignation.  Han Kew-sul, once he escaped from custody, turned on his fellow-Ministers as one distraught, and bitterly reproached them.  “Why have you broken your promises?” he cried.  “Why have you broken your promises?” The Ministers found themselves the most hated and despised of men.  There was danger lest mobs should attack them and tear them to pieces.  Pak Che-sun shrank away under the storm of execration that greeted him.  On December 6th, as he was entering the palace, one of the soldiers lifted his rifle and tried to shoot him, Pak Che-sun turned back, and hurried to the Japanese Legation.  There he forced his way into the presence of Mr. Hayashi, and drew a knife.  “It is you who have brought me to this,” he cried.  “You have made me a traitor to my country.”  He attempted to cut his own throat, but Mr. Hayashi stopped him, and he was sent to hospital for treatment.  When he recovered he was chosen by the Japanese as the new Prime Minister, Han Kew-sul being exiled and disgraced.  Pak did not, however, hold office for very long, being somewhat too independent to suit his new masters.

As the news spread through the country, the people of various districts assembled, particularly in the north, and started to march southwards to die in front of the palace as a protest.  Thanks to the influence of the missionaries, many of them were stopped.  “It is of no use your dying in that way,” the missionaries told them.  “You had better live and make your country better able to hold its own.”  A number of leading officials, including all the surviving past Prime Ministers, and over a hundred men who had previously held high office under the Crown, went to the palace, and demanded that the Emperor should openly repudiate the treaty, and execute those Ministers who had acquiesced in it.  The Emperor tried to temporize with them, for he was afraid that, if he took too openly hostile an attitude, the Japanese would punish him.  The memorialists sat down in the palace buildings, refusing to move, and demanding an answer.  Some of their leaders were arrested by the Japanese gendarmes, only to have others, still greater men, take their place.  The storekeepers of the city put up their shutters to mark their mourning.

At last a message came from the Emperor:  “Although affairs now appear to you to be dangerous, there may presently result some benefit to the nation.”  The gendarmes descended on the petitioners and threatened them with general arrest if they remained around the palace any longer.  They moved on to a shop where they tried to hold a meeting, but they were turned out of it by the police.  Min Yong-whan, their leader, a former Minister for War and Special Korean Ambassador at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, went home.  He wrote letters to his friends lamenting the state of his country, and then committed suicide.  Several other statesmen did the same, while many others resigned.  One native paper, the Whang Sung Shimbun, dared to print an exact statement of what had taken place.  Its editor was promptly arrested, and thrown into prison, and the paper suppressed.  Its lamentation voiced the feeling of the country:—­