THE AUTOMOBILE IN THE ORIENT.

The New York Times
February 26, 1904

It is perhaps not surprising that the amazed Korean should construe the American automobile and its tooling chauffeur and strangely clad occupants recently appearing "in his midst" and dashing wildly about the purlieus of his capital as a declaration of war. It is more or less a spectacle of terror even when there is a measured familiarity with its sound and smell and aspect. When it comes in upon an innocent people who have never seen or heard of anything like I before and whose vehicular observations, notwithstanding a new railroad or two, have been primitive and provincial beyond the most, it is no wonder that the wildest surmises are awakened by its appearance. Especially is this the case when the land is already electric with apprehensions of war and actually in the hearing of its awakening guns. What can such a prodigious spectacle import unless it be Mars's chariot or Bellona's, to mark the trail of battle when it wheels round its dazzling spokes.

It is little wonder that it seemed to the innocent Koreans, dwellers in the land of the Morning Calm, from of old not often broken by war's rude clamors, to be a spectre of portent and dread, and to justify the most damaging suspicions of its intentions and character. Apart from its alarming ensemble and the various noises on which it rode, as of bells and horns and pneumatic cut-offs, and suspirations of exhausted and renewed combustion, there was something sinister in its look in detail. Anything might be believed if it. Satan himself would come in a trap like that if his occasions led him thither, and would probably wear goggles like its inmates. Korea is a land of goggles, its Emperor's representing an optical spread beyond Minerva's owl, and the appearance there on any pretense of a larger pair might very naturally be interpreted as an offense to the ruler and an insult to the State. In fine, the prodigious go-cart excited Koreans almost to the point of riot, and it is no doubt by this time withdrawn as not suited to touring purposes in that country in its present stage of development.

But there is little doubt that the people there will some time grow used to the vehicle, perhaps in some of its more utilitarian and less spectacular aspects, and that it may come to play a part in their social and industrial progress greater than that of the torpedo boats and destroyers and ships of war of various nations and patterns which of late (as if they represented themselves to her as exemplars) have been so numerous, and widely noticeable in her harbors. We may reasonably conceive the time as not far off when not only the Korean Peninsula, so long curtained beneath her enchanted hermit veil of slumber, but the greater East of which she is an inconsiderable outlying promontory will give a hospitable welcome to these chariots of peace and progress, will make and use them herself and find them an instrument of deliverance out of her apathy and the weltering helplessness and intertia in which she has so long lain potent beyond all the josses in her pantheon and all the painted dragons on her banners.