556 MILITARY REFORM
required (military) expenditures by selling it off for cash. He referred to this as
"doing injury to those on top in order to benefit those below," a standard para-
phrase of the Mencian injunction to virtuous kings to reduce their expenditures
to alleviate tax burdens on the peasants. In this case he cited the words of the
grand duke (T'ai-kung, Lii Shang) of early Chou China, who when asked by King
Wen how to govern a state well. responded that the fortunes of a state depended
on whether the king distributed wealth to the people or confined its use to a nar-
row elite. He described four different situations in descending order: "The way
of a true king was to make thc people rich, but the way of a hegemon was to make
his petty officials lsal rich, and the way of a ruler barely able to keep his king-
dom was to make his middle-rank officials ltaeblll rich, and the way of a ruler
about to lose his kingdom was to make [his own] granaries rich."25 As one might
expect, Kw6n not only asked that surpluses be spent to enable tax reduction, he
also recommended cutbacks in unnecessary regular officials and clerks in the cap-
ital bureaus, slave employees, and special military petty officers in the Royal Trea-
sury (Naesusa), and abolition of the hiring of soldiers by private families.
Although Kw6n was not advocating Yu Hy6ngw6n's plan for total national-
ization of land by confiscation of private property, he did criticize CUlTent vio-
lations of the law that restricted royal grants of land to private individuals (sajon)
to four generations of descent from the original recipient, and prebendal grants
under royal warrant (sap 'ae) to the recipient only. He had heard that all such
grantees were retaining their control over thcse royal grants and converting them
to family property in perpetuity, in contravention of the will of the founders of
the dynasty. If it were allowed to continue, the amount of land controlled by the
state would shrink to a plot roo i on each side. He cited a story in the Shih-chi
of Ssu-ma Ch'ien that Emperor Tang of remote antiquity only granted fictive
fiefs to his nobles, preferring to give them bolts of silk instead ofland. "If Tang
with the whole world at his disposal was as sparing of land as this, how much
more so should a small country [like ours]? If granting tax revenue to private
individuals is regarded as something commonplace, it will produce the evils asso-
ciated with an age of decline."
What had to be done was to confiscate all parcels of land held beyond the
legal time or generational limit, expand land under state control and the tax rev-
enues therefrom, and use them to defray the expenses usually paid for by sup-
port tax cloth assigned to the capital bureaus.
Kw6n ended his long memorial by reminding the crown prince that the key
to good government was frugality and concern for the people. The king had to
set an example of modest consumption and impose sumptuary regulations all
the way down the social ladder. 20
Kw6n Ch6k's memorial provides convincing circumstantial evidence that
Yu Hy6ngw6n's Pan' gye surok was widely known and read in leading scholar-
official circles at the time and that the ideas of this pioneer of Practical Learn-
ing statecraft studies were by no means eonti ned to a small audience of recluse
outcastes. It also allows us to see how the seventeenth-century ideas ofYu were