PART IV CONCLUSION 573
than enough men to fill the military rosters without having to recruit yangban.
It was the shift from service to cloth taxes that had driven the commoners to
commend themselves to others as slaves or to take the tonsure and become Bud-
dhist monks, thus reducing the number of men available for service. His solu-
tion was to require that private slaves as well as commoners of good status be
obliged to perform military service, except that they be mixed together with-
out distinction (as opposed to Yu who wanted them to serve, but in separate
units from other status categories). To prevent their oppression by their own
masters, the state would relieve them of paying personal slave tribute to their
masters, presumably while on duty. Thus, hath commoners and slaves would
serve as soldiers, and the only distinction made would be bctween thosc serv-
ing at duty stations close to home or far away. If the former, they would be given
two support men to provide equipment or the cost of equipment; if the latter,
three. Of course, he was reintroducing support taxpayers into his reform plan
even though he earlier condemned them as illcgitimate. Thc point to he stressed
here, however, is that like Yu, Yi Ik was willing to use slaves as the main means
for alleviating the service burden on commoners of good status evcn though hc
deplored slavery in principle. The main reason was that he was not willing to
reimpose service on the scholar-official (or yangban) class. an attitude similar
to the reforming bureaucrats of the eighteenth century who only wanted to tax
the yangban, not enroll them for service.
But he differed from most of them because he also opposed the use of the
household cloth tax, ostensihly for the reason that it would be susceptihle to
corruption by officials and clerks. He agreed that it might produce a surplus in
revenue, but the new funds would only be spent wastefully. But the most impor-
tant reason was tucked away in his list of complaints: "It will be very wrong to
subject the most exalted and respected high officials and ministers to the pay-
ment of a tax on an equal basis with the common people because it will over-
turn the legitimate order of society (ch 'et 'ong)!" I f there were such a thing as a
Practical Learning tradition, it was not necessarily producing more socially rad-
ical or economically progressive thinkers in the eighteenth century.s
Where regular officials differed from Yu in their grasp of the situation was
that after the third quarter of the seventeenth century they forgot about the qual-
ity of the army and focused mainly on tax revenue. Yu was slill a creature of the
mid-seventeenth century who was born a couple of decacles after Hideyoshi and
lived through the Manchu invasions. He took the matter of a strong national
defense seriously and gave as much space in his writing to weapons, fort con-
stmction, defensive strategy, and troop training as tax payments and finance.
But his successors in the next century grappled with military "service" primar-
ily as a burdensome and oppressive tax system. They accepted exemptions from
military duty for yangban and other so-called irregular students and military offi-
cers and the like as a fact of life that could hardly be rcdressed, but they hopecl
to hring them into the financial system as taxpayers - an attitude that could be
described as a pragmatic adaptation to reality.