248 SOCIAL REFORMof the matrilineal rule, he complained that the rule had produced too many law-
suits over ownership of slave children, and he advised Sukchong to copy King
Sonjo's method of allowing private slaves to buy their way out of slavery (nap-
sak). ISS For that matter, even though the Westerner splinter group loyal to Song
Siyol's memory (the Patriarch's Faction [Naron]), returned to power in 1694,
the king ignored a hal f dozen proposals between 1697 and 17 I 4 to restore the
matrilineal rule, undoubtedly because the effects of that law had been so dis-
appointing.
Nevertheless, Hiraki Makoto has written that the issue had become thoroughly
politicized by this time: the Westerners took the side of the state by adopting
the matrilineal rule and relaxing status restrictions on slaves to secure more com-
moners for military service, while the Southerners defended the interests of the
slaveowners. Other scholars like Chon Hyongt'aek have carried the argument
further by linking it to the philosophical positions of the two major factions.
The Westerners supposedly followed the lead of Yulgok's practical and this-
worldly orientation toward problems, while the Southerners preferred abstract
speculation on ethics, spiritual cultivation, and the cosmos in the tradition of
T'oegye (Yi Hwang) and his disciples Yu Songnyong and Kim Song'il. They sup-
posedly supported the social status quo and the master/slave relationship by
investing it with moral significance.
This factional explanation of attitudes for and against the matrilineal rule is
far too simplistic. The Southerner leader, Mok Naeson, for example, favored
abolition of the matrilineal rule because it was not as effective as manumission
by purchase, not because he was opposed to liberalization of manumission pro-
cedures in principle. For that matter, the utility as well as the ethical propriety
of the matrilineal rule had always been a legitimate subject of debate for all par-
ties. The rule had always been found wanting in practice, and even Yu Hyongwon
(a Northerner by hereditary affiliation with friends and followers among eigh-
teenth-century Southerners), who opposed it in principle, still favored it as the
best available alternative to releasing some slaves from servitude. 1:i^6
No matter how ineffective the matrilineal law may have been in reducing the
slave population, its rescission left the state without any means for checking its
growth. Hiraki has pointed out that the creation of new military units through-
out the seventeenth century increased the demand for soldiers, and by 1730 there
was also a growing shortage of commoner males because too many were com-
mending themselves to powerful families to escape service obligations. It was
the pressure ofthese circumstances that explains King YOngjo's decision to adopt
the matrilineal rule again in 173 I. When the idea was first broached in 1730 by
Third State Councilor Cho Munmyong, a Westerner who appealed to the posi-
tions of Yulgok and Song Siyol in favor of the rule, Yongjo first rejected it on
the grounds that it could be easily corrupted or evaded.
A few months later, in 173 I, a secret censor from Kyonggi Province reported
to Yongjo that commoner peasants had been commending themselves as slaves