1006 EPILOGUEthe Confucian moral system. Confucians were morally obliged to preserve the
patrimony of their families, including slaves as well as real estate, and to show
the utmost respect for one's elders and superiors in the social order, a moral
obligation used by landlords and slaveowners to legitimize private property and
slavery.
Even though the idealistic Confucians agreed that the virtuous ruler was obliged
to guarantee subsistence to the common peasant, ideally through the grant of a
minimal plot of arable land according to the well-field model of the Chou dynasty,
they were faced with the reality of private property that had determined land
tenure in Korea for over a millennium. Since the early Choson kings ignored
appeals for nationalization and egalitarian redistribution, they confirmed the pri-
vate property of the landlords and opened the door to the recreation of the same
conditions in the maldistribution of wealth that had prevailed in the late four-
teenth century. As a result most Confucians paid only lip service to the notion
of national ownership and egalitarian redistribution.
Even less attention was paid to hereditary slavery that had been in practice
since the tenth or eleventh centuries, possibly because slavery itself had never
been condemned as immoral. At least the question of hereditary enslavement
of the innocent should have been raised by committed Confucians, but few did
so. In any case, the class interests of the landlords and slaveowners in a slave
society constituted an insuperable obstacle to idealistic Confucian purists.
Agriculture over Commerce alld Industry
These class interests were abetted by the overpowering and enduring belief by
Confucian scholars and officials alike that agricultural production was the only
legitimate way to produce wealth. Food and clothing were necessary to subsis-
tence, but all else was superfluous and contributed to unnecessary, ostentatious,
and immoral consumption. Industry and commerce were acknowledged as nec-
essary activities, but only in a limited way. Artisans had a role to play in pro-
viding the population with necessary nonagricultural goods, but any expansion
in the production of lUXury items would corrupt the morals of the people. Like-
wise commerce was necessary for the circulation of goods, but any excessive
profiteering would reduce the production of necessities by inducing peasants to
abandon their primary agricultural tasks in pursuit of commercial profit.
These ideal principles were compromised in real life because the nobility,
yangban, landlords, and the rich were allowed to enjoy the luxuries of life, the
skilled artisans were employed, often by the state, in producing the brocades,
silks, finc pottery, and other "unnecessary" items of conspicuous consumption,
and merchants were subsidized, often with monopoly licenses, to provide those
items to the king and upper class. Only the peasants were left to fulfill the Con-
fucian moral norms of frugality, but more by deprivation and the lack of wealth
than by adherence to abstract moral norms. These violations of Confucian norms
of simplicity, frugal ity, and modesty existed in evcry dynasty because those with