Voices in Bondage

Across the granite hills of Korea, ground under arrogant Jap heels, the word was relayed: if the people cried aloud for freedom, the peacemakers at Versailles might hear them.

On March 1, 1919, the funeral day of Korea's puppet Emperor, the people clad themselves in white mourning and the straw shoes of grief. Under the uneasy eyes of Jap gendarmes, 200,000 gathered in Seoul, the seaside capital. At two hours past noon, in thunderous mass unison, the people whipped forbidden banners into the air, shouted "Mansei!" ("Long Live Korea!"). In Pagoda Park a committee of 33 read a declaration: "We herewith proclaim the independence of Korea. . . ."

The passive, unarmed revolt led to savage repression. The Japs arrested, tortured, executed the Committee of 33; they flogged 11,000 other Koreans. The rocky Asian peninsula at Japan's back door, where China and Russia had vied for influence and may vie again, became a land of silent people.

Last week brought the 25th anniversary of the declaration of independence.* Korea was still a land of silent people. No one could say how few, if any, of the nation of 23,000,000 knew that China, the U.S. and Britain, at Cairo last November, had promised to restore their freedom "in due course." In Chungking, greying Kim Koo, head of a Korean provisional government, declared that Koreans want "full and immediate independence" after the war. But strategic Korea, after long years of bondage, seems more likely to become the ward of an international condominium until she has learned the ways of self government again.

*For a U.S. celebration of the day, see p. 76.

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