488 MILITARY REFORM
pie, the essence of both the early Chason and T'ang systems was service by all
but for a few minor exceptions. In pressing for a household tax levied in any
current product or in cash, Yi Samyong was really trying to Iiberatc the military
finance system from old categories.
Critics also opposed the household cloth tax on the grounds that the vast major-
ity of taxpaying households were so poor or destitute that the tax collectors would
have to use the whip and stick to obtain payment, forcing large numbers of peo-
ple to take flight from their villages. But Yi insisted that it would cause no undue
distress to assess a cloth tax by counting the number of persons in a household
exclusive of the young and elderly. It was simply a matter of bias for people to
claim that an annual one-p'if per household tax was too heavy compared to the
cruel exactions of the current system. "Any resentment against a household cloth
system would still be far preferable to the current personal service tax [sinyok]."
He also mentioned two other objections by critics. The first was that there
were currently far more slaves than commoners of good status (yang min) in the
country. If slaves were excluded from the household cloth tax calculations, then
the tax burdcns on them would be too light, but if they were included, they would
end up with a double service levy (i.e., one to the state and the other to the mas-
ter). The other objection was that under a household cloth system, the young,
adult males would be made duty soldiers in the ranks while the youths and elderly
would be the only ones left to pay support taxes, creating double tax burdens
on families. Yi countered these arguments by claiming the critics just misun-
derstood the basic idea behind the household cloth system. For example, in
P'yong'an Province (the place where the system was first to be tried out), there
were 170,000 households of which official and private slaves in combination
counted for about 30.000 (only 17.6 percent). If you cxtended these figures to
the nation as a whole, and reduced the total taxpaying households by an equiv-
alent percentage of slaves, the net sum of 700,000 taxpaying households should
easily provide 500,000 p'il of support cloth tax revenue. Of course. even if it
could be assumed that the census statistics for P'yong'an were accurate, the per-
centage of slaves in the population was undoubtedly much higher in the central
and southern regions of the country.
Yi claimed that the purpose of the household cloth system was not simply
to alleviate the burdens of commoners of good status (yangmin), but also to
provide enough men to serve in the armed forces, especially since the disso-
lution of the early Five Guards system meant that the only troops left capable
of fighting were the rotating duty soldiers (hasu or heads of household who
served on duty) of the Royal Division, Crack Select Soldiers, and Special Cav-
alry Unit of the Military Training Agency (i.e., prior to unification of the last
two in thc Forbidden Guard Division later that year), and the [7.5001 muske-
teers of the Military Training Agency - a total of something over 30.000 men.
In addition. there wcre around 200,000 sago (slave) soldiers. and another
200,000 membcrs of the Anti -Manchu Division (stationed in K yonggi Province),