538 MILITARY REFORM
amy as progress from a more ancient to a more modern mode of economic life,
then the household tax represented a flexible and progressive response to chang-
ing circumstances. Had the governing class in Korea at that time been even more
progressive than they were, they might have considered not only taxing nona-
gricultural industry, commerce, and trade, but even stimulating those areas of
activity as a means of building the wealth of state and society at large, but it was
not capable of adopting that point of view.
Yu Hyongw6n clearly belongs in the conservative camp on this issue at least.
Even though in other respects he was open to change and expressed admiration
for Kim Yuk's t({('dollg tribute reform, which was a progressive adaptation of
the tribute tax system to developing market conditions, he was not prepared for
any change that would violate the principle of universal military service and the
militia model. Although he recognized that the separation of rotating duty sol-
diers from support-taxpayers was not fully a militia system, the rotation of duty
soldiers presupposed preservation of the principle of returning the troops to their
farms for prolonged intervals between duty assignments, which was close enough
to the principle of the self-financing of soldiers and the militia ideal to suit his
sensibilities. While he did not discuss the household cloth tax, he did oppose
the use of a land tax for financing the military except where justified by histor-
ical precedent, such as the use of military colony land - a system, by the way,
that was based on the direct use of soldier labor on land rather than the taxation
of privately owned land. As we will see, when his name was first introduced at
court in I750 during the debate over reform of the military service system, his
leading intellectual disciple at the time, Kw6n Ch6k, acting as a virtual self-
appointed spokesman for Yu, vigorously opposed the household cloth tax, a posi-
tion that was quite consistent with Yu's theoretical stance on the proper form of
military finance.
What Yu had regarded as a corruption or deterioration of the early Chason
system of rotating duty soldiers because of the growth of illegal substitution of
cloth payments for actual service, might also be regarded as an institutional shift
that required a flexible response by divorcing the fiscal support for duty soldiers
from adult males of good or commoner status to more general sources of rev-
enue. The real irony of the situation was that just at the timc that military ser-
vice was becoming more of a tax than a service problem, the number of men
who were able to gain de iure and de facto exemption from payment of the cloth
tax was increasing. This was accompanied by a long trend toward the debase-
ment of military service that had to be the product of Korea's most intense period
of Confucian learning. Scholars and students regarded the listing of one's name
on a military roster, even though it entailed no more than the payment of a cloth
tax, as disastrous to one's status. It was no longer a question of evasion by a nar-
row elite of yang ban progeny -largc numbers of commoncrs were using every
device imaginable to escape military service registration, possibly gaining a step
or two on the ladder of prestige as well as avoiding the onerous burden of tax