sweep away all
religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an
ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the
divine in man.

In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to convince me of the
truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the
country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission
work here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. But
I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has
dispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of
social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs
nothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing to
forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the
fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education,
sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping
mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may
ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.

Kobe, Japan.

{60}

VII

KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"

I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. In
the civilization into which I have come science and invention are in
swaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of
Western Europe still in the womb of Time.

This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I am
travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen,"
as the Japanese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recorded
history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era,
and whose general features must have changed but little in all this
time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be
photographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old
Testament.

The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in the
primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are
of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here
never standing between the "plow-handles," as we say, because there is
only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With
sickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the
fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly
high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock
walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vin