MILITARY FINANCE 493
vagrants. Once this happened, it set in motion the vicious cycle of transferring
tax obligations from the departed to the remaining, the neighbors and relatives
in the village, who were subjected to "the whip and stick" of the tax collectors.
The situation was exacerbated by tax evaders who posed as students of literary
and military affairs. The so-called yuhak, or nondegreed scholars, were young,
robust men who never cracked a book nor shot an arrow. They were worthless
for fighting and never paid a foot of cloth or a measure of grain in support taxes,
thus leaving the entire burden of supporting the military establishment to the
poorest "lower households" (haho).
Yi pointed out that the standard methods of making adjustments to distribute
service more equally (kyunyok) were doomed to failure. In years offamine, for
example, the annual investigations to fill empty slots in the military rosters (sech 0)
were suspended, and officials would search out runaways and offer reductions
in their cloth tax assessments to induce them to return and pay taxes. These were
all good ideas, but scveral years offamine had forced the authorities to suspcnd
the registration of adult men for service or taxes, and there was no one left to
serve. So many had run away or died that reduction of tax rates had become
standard practice, but that left the military system short of revenue. Officials in
the province then ordered that all relatives of runaway or deceased soldiers and
slaves to the fourth degree (including uncles, first cousins. and nephews) would
henceforth pay the military cloth levy, offsetting whatevcr henefit might have
hecn conferred the previous year by cutting the tax rate. The standard tempo-
rary remedies were thus no more useful than "pouring a cup of water on a cart-
ful of burning wood; you would be better off doing nothing at all rather than
adopting a temporary measure that cannot be continued."
That brought Yi to an evaluation of the household cloth system. He acknowl-
edged that the measure was adopted out of necessity even though everyone kncw
it was full of difficulties, but the grand purpose of the system was definitely to
"make service equal" (kyunyok). The problem was that opinion was divided
between that of Yi Samyong and his critics in the censorate. Yi Samyong had
given two reasons for the law: that a tax on all households including officials,
yangban, and scholars was justified hecause even the highest ministers of state
were already paying the land tax as landowners, and there was no justification
for excluding from the military service taxes only the families of the sabu (scholar-
officials). The critics, on the other hand, held that it was wrong to institute such
a radical and unprecedented reform in a period of famine.
Yi Sehwa felt that in view of these two extreme and contrary opinions, there
was no reason why the alternatives could not be studied at leisure, and tried out
or not as seen fit. Hc opposed a sudden and rash adoption of a system that was
bound to destroy social harmony, but he did not oppose the household cloth tax
in principle. He reminded Sukchong that both he and the governor had been
asked to submit their written opinions on the household cloth proposal when it
was under debate at court in 168 I. The governor had, in fact, indicated a pref-
erence for simultaneously eliminating thc per capita levy on slaves (i.e., women