Stand Up, Patriots!
Two days later I tasted free air again — and the sight that met me at Gwanghwamun stopped me cold.
"...What in the world is all this?"
Rumors had drifted even into the prison cells: that the state tribunal raised before Gwanghwamun was, frankly, far too grand a stage for a mere criminal, and that court tongues had wagged about it without rest. The reality smashed every expectation I had carried with me.
I turned toward the palace and hunted for the man responsible, my eyes flat with disbelief.
What is this? Why is Gojong treating me so well?
The platform and the court arranged before Gwanghwamun as if to be seen, the chairs set apart with such care for the honored guests — the whole interrogation ground looked, at a glance, like those old photographs of the Joint Conference of Officials and People.
Then someone whispered beside me.
"Looks like this has gotten bigger than we thought, Seung-man."
"I'd say so. It's a little much."
Hong Yeong-sik had left his father, Hong Sun-mok, behind and drawn close to me somewhere along the way. He came up now with a startled face and murmured in my ear, and I agreed without thinking.
I still could not fathom why Gojong had accepted a public hearing at all. This was supposed to be a courtroom — a place for some lowly subject's self-criticism before his exalted sovereign. It looked a great deal more like a rally hall built for Communist Party speeches.
"Leave the accused now. From here he goes on alone."
"See it through."
"Thank you for your concern, sir."
Hong Yeong-sik and the other prisoners from the cells offered their encouragement, and then they were gone from my sight.
"This way."
"Yes, sir."
Having forcibly separated me from Hong Yeong-sik and the others who had been dragged along to the tribunal, the Uigeumbu bailiffs and the officers of the Hyeongjo spoke again.
"There is a royal command. High ministers and generals of the Qing are present, as is the Japanese Envoy. Mind your words."
"A royal command, you say?"
"That's right. A royal command. We're rooting for you too, so make sure you wash the crime away and ask for pardon. Kid."
"Thank you."
"Good."
Having taken his spare farewell, the Hyeongjo officer hauled me up onto the platform and vanished behind the curtains.
And so my trial began.
"The accused, Syngman Rhee — come forward."
The man who opened the proceedings was Seo Gwang-beom, the counselor who had handled my earlier hearings. Behind him sat the chief interrogator, Prince Heungin, and to his left and right were the Right Royal Secretary, Kim Ok-gyun, and the Superintendent, Bak Jeong-yang.
Before I answered the summons I turned on the platform and stole a look at the crowd packed against Gwanghwamun, and at the foreigners in every cut of dress among them. A rough head count put them at ten thousand, easy.
They've come in droves!
The crush of bodies should have pressed the air from my lungs. Instead a strange anticipation rose with it — excitement, and something like a hunger to win welling up from somewhere below — and I drew my courage from that.
So when Seo Gwang-beom called my name, I answered like a man who belonged there.
"Yes! Citizen Syngman Rhee, present as summoned!"
"Ahem. The accused will take the seat prepared for him."
The word citizen earned a brief cough from Seo Gwang-beom. Behind him, Prince Heungin, who held the chair, let his face tighten at my voice and my nerve; the other examiners merely nodded toward Seo Gwang-beom as if it were no concern of theirs.
I sat, and the interrogation began. From the first exchange its tone was rougher, and more relentless, than I had expected.
"The accused, Syngman Rhee: do you admit that on such-and-such a date you entered Unhyeongung and associated with the rifleman Yu Bok-man — named as ringleader of the military revolt and a treasonous cabal — and with others of that faction?"
"I do."
"The hangers-on, merchants, and underlings of Unhyeongung stole, under the pretext of royal orders, from the offices of Gyeonggi Province and from the property of the government camps, and moved soldiers as they pleased. You saw this and did not report it?"
"I did not report it."
"Why?"
"Because I pitied the junior officers and the common soldiers who rose, and the poor of Hanseong who joined them."
"You sympathized with them?"
"I did."
"Then what conversation did you hold with these great traitors, who incited the army and deluded the people and did harm to the government offices? How many times did you meet?"
"I met them separately three times in all. Rather than any deep exchange, I simply laid out my thoughts, and they, if anything, listened."
I answered honestly, my face calm. Kim Ok-gyun, who had been recording every word in careful detail, stopped mid-stroke and put a question of his own.
"And what, accused, was the subject of these talks?"
"The subject, sir?"
"That's right."
In that instant I did not miss the flicker of his right eye.
Say what you came to say.
Thank you, sir.
I tipped my head a fraction in thanks, and wet my lips. It was time to come to the point.
"We spoke of the Kingly Way."
Prince Heungin started, catching the danger in the air, and asked again.
"The Kingly Way, you said?"
"That's right."
"The accused is straying from the matter at—"
"Hear him out. Then what, to the accused, is the Kingly Way?"
The moment Prince Heungin moved to cut me off, Seo Gwang-beom's face tightened and he stepped in. He had my chair shifted farther from the bench and set me on my feet at the very edge of the platform.
And that, I understood at last, was the Enlightenment Party's arrangement — Kim Ok-gyun, Bak Jeong-yang, Park Yung-hyo, and Seo Gwang-beom telling me, without a word, to throw my voice at the people until my throat tore.
I rose. I straightened my back. I did not face the chief interrogator. I faced the people gathered like a cloud before Gwanghwamun, who had come to look at me.
I dragged the air down into my lungs until my chest swelled, and from that fullness the fire that had guttered out with the failure of the revolt leapt up again.
The words cracked across the square. The murmur before Gwanghwamun died as if a blade had cut it. Every gaze in that crowd turned on me, and with the nameless weight of it came its opposite — a rebound of defiance that filled me to the brim.
"Mencius said that human beings live distinguished by humaneness and by virtue. The Kingly Way, further, is benevolent government, righteous rule — the governance of King Wen. Xunzi said: if a man lacks virtue, do not honor him; if he lacks ability, do not appoint him; if he has no merit, give him no reward; if he has committed no crime, do not punish him. Think on it, all of you. These are not obscure sayings. They are the right words that everyone already knows!"
I threw my arms wide and began to speak in earnest, pouring it into them.
"To keep propriety toward one another — that is where the Kingly Way begins. When a sovereign is a sovereign and a minister is a minister, government stands upright. This is not a hard saying. The Mandate of Heaven is not, in truth, something Heaven writes out and hands to you as power. It is this: that a sovereign possess moral character as a sovereign, that he insist on fairness toward every person and be the first to practice it, that he earn respect — and from that respect, support! That support is the people's will. It is the people's heart. It is the heart of Heaven!"
Mencius's theory of righteous revolution says as much. There is no greater meaning you can stack on top of the people's will. The essence of politics is popularity. The birth of a hero with the people at his back announces a new beginning. Conversely, a ruler who has lost the people will fall. He always falls.
"Mencius said that if those below are as humane as Tang and Wu, and those above as savage as Jie and Zhou, the country will surely be overturned — and only then will it stand upright. If not, the crime of usurpation will be condemned for a long age, and that, he said, is the natural order of things. Ruler and subject are not as Heaven is to Earth. At the root, they are the same."
It has always been so. The chain of democracy that the Western powers now force upon the world, riding the tide of modernization, is not some metaphysical terror that crossed the void from another star. No. It is not a thing to be feared.
I turned my head toward the place in the gallery where the foreigners had clustered.
"In what does a people-centered state fall short of democracy!"
Hoping the truth of it would carry, I stamped my foot and shouted with everything I had.
In the East, winning the hearts of the people has long been called the heart of Heaven, and states that took the people as their foundation were born thousands of years ago. Unlike the Western powers, who only today have learned to fear the people's wrath, having first shaken themselves free of a mere religion — the East has known that terror, and that anger, from the beginning.
"The glory of Taejo, who drove out a fallen dynasty and its rotten great houses and founded Joseon anew before the praise of all the people, was not fate. It was the people's support. It was history! A revolution of the people, who laid the cornerstone of the state upon the people's heart — a great upheaval once in ten thousand generations!"
Having praised Yi Seong-gye for a moment, I slid a glance at Prince Heungin, whose face had gone red, and took his measure. At the mention of Yi Seong-gye he wore the look of a man willing to hear a little more.
I shrugged at that, and then I dragged up an old dispute of Joseon — one that had gone cold, and been settled in peace.
"A sovereign and his ministers are beings who cannot abandon one another. Still more, a sovereign and his people are beings who cannot abandon one another at all."
The Rites Controversy.
Someone might say it was nothing but years wasted arguing over how long to wear mourning clothes. In Joseon it was a matter so grave it might have kindled civil war, a blade set against the very root of the country. And so I can say this, without flinching, to those who dismiss the Rites Controversy:
This was the question that decided the fate of the Republic of Korea — and, beyond that, the question that woke a people's character, and a people's hunger for democracy!
"This country, from before the Three Han were even founded, honored the people and feared them. Why? Because those who thought themselves noble truly believed — and truly feared — that the people were the most precious thing there was."
Put simply: if the medieval states of Europe, on the road to the modern age, fought over whether the law stood above the sovereign or beneath him, and split thereafter into republics and constitutional monarchies, each going its own way — Joseon, which had no constitution, used the Rites Controversy to rethink, through Confucian ideology, the social place of the sovereign, of Neo-Confucian learning, and of the people.
Under the ideology of Neo-Confucianism, the sovereign too was no different from a scholar-official. He was equal.
"I dare, without shame, to call myself a disciple of Master Song."
Having set Song Si-yeol — the spiritual head of the Westerners and the Old Doctrine — at the front of my praise, I spoke to the people of Hanyang. Far back in the crowd, the Confucian students and literati who had come up from the southern provinces leaned in to listen.
I have to show those men a road. A new road, through the Neo-Confucianism of Joseon that has been buried in pitch dark.
"They say this country, Joseon, is a nation of the scholar-officials. Then I will say this: every person in Joseon is a scholar-official. Every person is a literatus!"
A gasp went up from the vast crowd packed against Gwanghwamun.
The claim was that radical. That extreme.
But it is not something that never existed. It is only a theory everyone agreed to keep quiet about.
The political philosophy of the Westerners, refined through the Rites Controversy and the development of Li-Qi monism, was perfectly clear.
Sovereign and minister, commoner and slave — if you follow Neo-Confucianism with any rigor, every one of them is the same scholar-official. At the root, there is nothing to distinguish them as human beings.
That was how the Confucian scholars of this country — the most learned men, who had monopolized the most power and the most respect — had ordered their own thought. Everyone is a scholar-official. And I read it this way: it is a claim for the equality of human beings!
For a Joseon that had entered the nineteenth century, this was the old wisdom of the sages it needed most — the inheritance of the ancestors, the counsel of the men who came before.
"Li-Qi monism! This country, Joseon, is more advanced than any nation under heaven. I dare to be certain of it!"
Of course, no one officially stood up and said, Let us free the slaves, let us abolish rank. There were only men who said something close to it, were cursed for it, and were shown the door.
Yulgok Yi I was one. So was Heo Gyun, who argued the Homillon, and Jeong Yeo-rip, who led the Great Unity Society and argued On the Public Ownership of All Under Heaven. They were so innovative that the blows of everyone around them, and the wrath of the sovereign, nearly erased even the trace of their existence.
But a shade of meaning is a shade of meaning. If the agitation I fitted to the age could keep the people of Joseon from being left behind by the tide of modernization — if it could help us find a road of our own — what did a lie matter?
It doesn't matter at all!
For my country, for the blood that ran in this body, I had courage enough to play the false sage. Guilt? That was a luxury.
I appealed to the people in the front ranks, who hung on the speech as if spellbound.
"Across the sea, the nations of the West dismiss this country, Joseon, as uncivilized — a mere tributary and nothing more. But has there been, anywhere in the East, a country like this Joseon, where the people themselves have risen again and again, shaking themselves free, to set the old Kingly Way back on its feet and take justice back with their own hands?"
I lifted my chin, insolent on purpose, toward the Japanese Envoy and the men of the Qing seated in the gallery, and I wanted that picture burned into the people of Hanyang.
We had to make the people of Joseon understand, hard and deep, that we were not a mere tributary. Not a feeble little country.
"They say that in France the people's revolution, which rose early against a sovereign's coldness, was in the end betrayed by the founding of an empire. England, first under heaven, with all its rich produce and treasure, still has more than half its people starving as paupers, dragged to the workplace drunk on opium, enduring a life worse than a slave's! Beside it, Holland apes government with a hollow trick and deceives its people, and a worn-out monarchy has taken its seat. A handful of families pretend to rule and make fools of the people! In America, which claims to choose its chief with fairness, a chief who tried to punish corrupt officials was assassinated in broad daylight! Ha! Are those true civilized nations? Do men who abandoned human decency long ago have any right to haul around nothing but powerful cannon and rifles and steamships, and call it the spreading of civilization?"
"They do not!"
Someone answered from behind me. I looked back. It was the Superintendent, Bak Jeong-yang.
The most important thing, when you agitate a crowd, is to keep comparing, keep insisting: You are better than those people. A people's self-regard, inflated past the evidence, will in the end find itself a ghost — and that ghost becomes the rise of a fierce nationalism.
How do I know? Because this is propaganda. This is the trend of the nineteenth century. This is advanced politics. Take it a step further and it is populism.
So this is it — the blood of a man who can work a crowd runs in me too.
I let that cheap feeling called conscience slide away under the gaze of the people who were listening.
If the true Confucian devotees came after me later to refute this nonsense, they would be the only ones to lose.
Why?
Incitement takes a single sentence. Refuting it will cost you gentlemen a few thousand dissertations, written with great care.
So I set the worry aside. What mattered now were these people, who had gathered like a cloud in Hanyang just to look at me.
I turned my head back to the crowd, closed my fists, and shouted with a heat that shook me.
"A month ago, the soldiers of the Seonhye Office who rose in Hanyang, and all of you, were righteous literati who meant to set the Daewongun in his place and put a defiled Kingly Way back on its feet. You are heroes who saved the country! You are the same kind of heroes as the meritorious subjects Taejo kept at his side when he founded this Joseon! So lift your heads. Lift them without shame!"
Having shouted that, I sprang down from the platform and plunged in among them, seized whoever's hands I found, and pulled them to their feet. Startled bailiffs came running to take me — and were stopped dead by the crowd, and could do nothing but watch.
"Stand up! You — and you!"
"Wh-what...!"
The people I hauled up, standing without the first idea why, looked at me at first in an awkward half-crouch. I put the questions to them one by one.
"Are you not a person of Joseon?"
"I— I am."
"Do you speak the language of Joseon?"
"Of course I do."
"Then do you favor the severe punishment of corrupt officials?"
"Well, yes...?"
"Do you hate the men who eat this country hollow — the men who go against the dying charge of Taejo, who founded this Joseon!"
"I— well. No. Yes! I do!"
"Then do you agree that this Joseon, rotten through, must now be reformed!"
"I do!"
"Then straighten your back and stand! You are a patriot!"
One by one I called every person in the front rank a patriot and pulled them up, and then the second rank, and the third, moving without tiring, shouting without rest, lifting them into heroes.
When at last they were all on their feet before Gwanghwamun, I sprang back onto the platform and loosed one last cry.
WAAAAAH!!!
The vast crowd roared until Gwanghwamun itself seemed about to come apart — cheering, and afraid — but the interrogation was no longer an interrogation.
A few days later, I received my verdict.