PART IV CONCLUSION 577
strategy for national defense reflected a kind of static, Maginot-line mentality
that was inappropriate for more mobile Manchu forces, and ultimately one could
argue that a circumspect foreign policy would have been more useful than the
double-door phalanx of defensive garrisons he borrowed from Yu S6ngnyong.
In short, the so-called Practical Learners had no monopoly on sagacity. State-
craft was shared by both active officials and retired scholars, and one needs to
understand the interplay of ideas between the realm of the contemplative and
the active. The study of Practical Learning statecraft divorced from the real world
is the kind of useless intellectual exercise that has to be ahandoned.