1012 EPILOGUEHe defended his position on the grounds that tribute, particularly royal tribute,
was an immoral and unrestrained exercise in monarchical acquisitiveness that
deserved to be brought under control by a more reasonable system of taxation.
His admiration for hired or wage labor as a means of replacing slave cultiva-
tors on the estates of the large landlords or uncompensated labor service by com-
moners certainly appeared as a rational and innovative response to changing
circumstances rather than a dogmatic mimicking of classical precedent. He argued
that wage or hired labor was preferable to slave labor on moral grounds because
it would eliminate the cruel and coercive treatment of slaves, and on apparently
liberal grounds because hired laborers entered into employment by free choice
and willing agreement.
These arguments undeniably had aspects of humaneness and liberalism to them,
but his thinking was by no means free of the constraints relevant to his times.
He did not argue that wage labor had proved its superiority by his own obser-
vation of contemporary facts, but rather by hearsay information about wage labor
in China. Wage labor was not a new phenomenon; it had been around since long
before the beginning of the dynasty without doing damage to Korean social cus-
tom. In fact, he argued that hired labor would not promote the freedom of the
individual laborer at all. To the contrary, he guaranteed that the Chinese expe-
rience demonstrated that hired laborers were as respectful and subordinate to
their employers as Confucian standards required. Choosing one's employer was
neither to produce freedom of choice in society at large, or to transform labor-
ers into commodities and wage slaves in a capitalist system.
One ofYu's overarching themes was the establishment of a truly moral soci-
ety ruled by moral officials. He denigrated the examination system for its fail-
ure to producing honest and dedicated officials, but he saw the answer in adapting
ancient institutions, particularly resuscitating the moribund official school sys-
tem and initiating the face-to-face evaluation of candidates for office. Yu's ideal
society was to be as hierarchical as contemporary Korean society, but on an
almost completely different basis - demonstrated superiority in Confucian eth-
ical behavior.
Yu was a defender of popular or peasant welfare, but his sympathies for the
common peasants, slaves, lowly clerks, and women were often balanced or off-
set by his commitment to the necessity of hierarchical relations. He sought to
level the playing ground by having the state confiscate the landed property and
reduce the slaves of the yangban and landlords, but he often made certain con-
cessions to social reality by accommodating aspects of inherited status that favored
members of the noble family, merit subjects and their relatives, and the sons of
officials without office of their own, and to denigrate nothoi, clerks, slaves, and
women. He was willing to prolong the period of slavery because he felt that the
yangban were emotionally and physically as yet incapable of dispensing with
their slave labor. At one point, he even assured the yangban families that his reforms
would not destroy them because their wealth and traditional respect for educa-
tion would guarantee the success of their sons in his new system of schools. He