COMMUNITY COMPACT SYSTEM 717
compact meeting for major transgressions. If the violator failed to correct his
ways, the compact secretary (Chigwoi) would report it to the head of the com-
pact (Yakchong). who would then instruct them. If the violators expressed a will-
ingness to reform, their names would be recorded in the book, but if they refused
to submit to criticism, they would be expelled from the compact. Anyone who
failed to conform to rules for observance of rites and customs, refused to grant
a loan to somcone in need, missed a repayment deadline, or damaged an object
he had borrowed would be recorded for a misdemeanor on the register. Although
T'oegye left out the Lii-Family compact provision for recording misdemeanors
in a separate register, he provided a system of nine levels of punishment with-
out specifying exactly what these punishments should be, even though pre-
sumably he intended that bastinado with a bamboo stick would be included.
Although the Lii-Family compact described a wide variety of violations of
the community compact, T'oegye mainly emphasized punishment for failure to
encourage others to cultivate their virtue. His draft regulations duplicated, per-
haps inadvertently, only twelve of the Lii-Family compact's thirty-one viola-
tions: six violations of the moral code, such as perverse confusion of family order,
disrespect for parents and elder brothers, unfriendliness to relatives. failure to
help those in need, and causing disrespect for the legitimate wife in the family;
and six violations of general conduct and public obligations, such as fighting
and scolding, using one's strength to lord it over the weak, committing acts of
aggression, falsifying or exaggerating facts to accuse others or to set them up
for a criminal investigation, and tardiness at compact meetings. The rest of the
articles were similar to previous laws or regulations in local organizations like
the YUhyangso.
T'oegye's compact was not original and was never put into practice, but it
was respected for the rest of the dynasty as a standard for future advocates of
the community compact system. Toward the end of his life he did not display
any special zeal for the promotion of the system, and after the succession of
King Sonio in 1567, he only praised the Sohak as a text for moral education
but made no recommendation about the community compact.
T'oegye was even critical of the emphasis in the Lit-Family Community Com-
pact on ranking participants according to age because it denigrated the social
distinction between the "noble and base," the same kind of criticism leveled by
the opponents of Cho Kwangjo! T'oegye's statecraft, in other words, belongs
more in the tradition of muscular Confucianism that backed up the rhetoric of
persuasion by the threat offorce and supported the status quo in discriminatory
social relations.>2
King Sc')njo and Yulgok, 1571-74In the 1570s, during thc reign of King Sonjo, however, a tide of support devel-
oped for community compacts among the highest ofllcials. In 157 I a Confu-
cian scholar, Hwang Ok, proposed adoption of the Lii-Farnily Community