402 MILITARY REFORMMoreover, at the present time when a son is born to a family of the people, even
berore he is weaned, he is registered for military service and his name is counted
for the purpose of collecting the cloth tax. If a commoner family has three or
four children, then what one family has to pay in cloth taxes for a year comes to
over TOO p 'il of standard cloth. Even before the child has grown up, he becomes
a vagabond. and even though the court has issued orders that [the officials]
should wait for a boy to attain majority before he is registered for military ser-
vice. this larder] has generally become a dead letter, and I have not seen one
case where this law has been followed. Although this may be the fault of the
magistrates, if we did not have this business of using soldiers for the purpose of
collecting cloth payments, how would this evil exist?18Yu claimed that in his own time military service itself had virtuaJly been con-
verted into a cloth tax payment, a condition that was to become even more promi-
nent in the next two centuries: "If someone is called a soldier, it means that he
is a cloth taxpayer. This has long been the custom, so that the name, "soldier,"
has come to mean cotton cloth [myonpoJ, If you caJl someone an infantryman
[pobyc'5ng], everyone thinks of it as a name for cloth; they do not realize it is a
term for soldier."19
Furthermore, just as in Yulgok's time, provincial military commanders and
garrison officers spent the cloth fees "on luxuries for their wives and concu-
bines. or for the bribes they pay to powerful people .... The income is used
completely for the expenses of gifts and favors for friends, wine, food, banquets
and music."20
The number of men available for service was also reduced by laxity and cor-
ruption in the registration system. Yulgok had also pointed out that since the
regulation requiring registration of eligible males every six years had not been
observed, in 1553 King Myongjong ordered a special registration to discover
aJl the draft evaders. Unfortunately, the registrars were so anxious to fiJI the rolls
that they registered everyone and everything in sight, not only beggars and
vagrants, but chickens and dogs as well. In short, the registers were worthless,
and twenty years later, the shortage of troops was just as bad.
The reduction in the number of troops on duty at garrisons and forts was also
matched by a low level of military training for the duty soldiers, and if mobi-
lized in an emergency, they would be a poor match for regular or professional
soldiers.
This is the reason why even though you have in name a garrison that is supposed
to have a thousand men in it, in fact there is not even one man there. And those
who actually are soldiers spend day and night worrying ahout the difficulty of
meeting their cloth payments: they do not know anything about archery or riding
horses ... The so-called cavalrymen also only pay cloth; there is not one man of
them who has a horse.^21