718 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONCompact, but the Ministry of Rites opposed the idea because under current famine
conditions any attempt to force peasants to spend timc in compact meetings would
only lead to disruption. Later that year Yulgok, who was then magistrate of
Ch'ongju in Ch'ungch'ong Province, established the Sowon Community Com-
pact with the approval of the elders of the district. 23
In 1572 when Censor-General Ho Hyop again proposed that the king adopt
community compacts for the whole country, King Sonjo declined because of the
continuing famine and condemned it as a plan that would confuse local customs.
In 1573 Yi Kyongmyong referred to Chu Hsi's remark that the Lii-Family Com-
pact should only be adopted by villages on a voluntary basis, but later that year
the Office of Censor-General argued that compacts were essential for reform-
ing the perverse mores and recommended that it be adopted at least in the cap-
ital, even though it was presumably designed for villages in the countryside.
The movement to institute community compacts nationwide culminated in a
major court discussion of the issue in 1573, when Chief State Councilor K won
Ch'ol, Sccond State Councilor Pak Sun, Third State Councilor No Susin, and
Chief of the Military Affairs Commission Hong Som all praised community com-
pacts and mentioncd that Korean versions of them called kye or to had already
been tried before a number of times in certain villages. Only Assistant Chief of
the Military Affairs Commission Yi T'ak opposed adopting compacts by royal
decree and recommended instead that Chu Hsi's corrected edition of the Lu-Fam-
ily Community Compact be printed and distributed nationwide to schools and
local communities as a moral text. Sonjo decided to print and distribute the text,
but he left adoption of community compacts up to individual villages to decide. 24
The next month Yulgok and Kim Uong of the Office of Special Counselors
urged Sonjo to support community compacts as the means of national moral
regeneration.^2 ) The king began to waver, and the Ministry of Rites presented a
draft set of regulations to bring the community compact model into conformity
with Korcan circumstances by reducing the number of meetings and the cost of
food and wine, and dropping the requirement for a register of demerits.
One of the recommendations, however, was vastly more significant because
it transformed the essential nature of the community compact from an agency
of self-government into a deputized organization of the district magistrate. The
ministry argued that since there were too few local people of superior moral
quality to run the compact organization, the district magistrate should act as either
the head (Yakchong) or secretary (Chigwol) of the compact concurrently. Sonjo
agreed to adopt this form of the community compact for the entire nation, the
first official community compact in the dynasty's history, but by the second lunar
month of 1574 he stopped the program because of famine and declared that the
state was obliged first to provide for the economic support of the people (yang-
min) before undertaking to educate them in moral standards (kyomin).26
Sonjo apparently still intended to follow through with his initial order after
the famine was over, but Yulgok apparently changed his mind about the feasi-
bility of introducing the community compact during a famine. Echoing Men-