400 MILITARY REFORMSince the situation in the mid-seventeenth century had changed so little from
the late sixteenth century, Yu found it profitable to quote at length from the lead-
ing critic of the military system at that time, Yulgok. Yulgok remarked that the
conversion of duty soldiers to cloth taxpayers was probably the fundamental
weakness of the system itself, not only because it reduced the number of real
soldiers, hut increased tax burdens on the adult commoners and their families:
Even though paying cloth is more convenient than performing military service,
they [the families of men liable for military service J still find this hard to do, For
this reason, if they have to perform military service a couple of times, their fami-
lies become impoverished and unable to support themselves and begin to take
flight one after the other. And in the next year when an inspection is made of the
military registers and people are forced to assume military duty, their whole clan
in the village is forced to assume military service. And then when the whole clan
absconds, the burden is placed on the relatives of the relatives. The calamity
spreads like weeds so that there is no end to it; in the future it will get to the
point where the peoplc will have no seed [children?] left over.I'In a memorial to King Sonjo around 1575 Yulgok blamed the corruption of
military service on an evil coalition of interest between the garrison comman-
ders and the duty soldiers:
Thcse types [of officers] only know how to fleece their troops in order to benefit
themselves. What else would they be concerned about? The soldiers, who find
long tours of duty on guard burdensome and voluntarily pay cloth to avoid mili-
tary service, are only too happy to go along with them [the commanders 1. Those
who do stay ill the garrisons are forced to perform duties they find hard to bear
and arc made responsible for paying for costs they find difficult to manage. It is
like being fried and simmered in the flames of their own fat.
People arc not wood and stone, so who would not look out for his own wel-
fare [in these circumstances]? And when they see other people avoiding military
service and resting at ease in their own homes, there is no one who would not
long for [this too] and also emulate this behavior. If too many people avoid mili-
tary service and the garrisons and redoubts become empty [of soldiers], this will
induce the people who live nearby [the garrisons] to borrow other people's
names and have substitutes checked off whenever inspections are made to ferret
out corruption. The only thing that officials who make the rounds on inspection
actually do is inspect the numbers. Does anyone of them check to see if the
numbers are true or falsc')I4Obviously, commoners did not have to attain yangban status to evade mili-
tary duty, and officials were only concerned with maintaining troop quotas on
paper, not on guaranteeing that the barracks would he filled with troops. 15
Yu described a similar situation for his own time. Not only were the garrisons