CASH AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 967for the starving and found schools to educate the youth in Confucian learning.
He did not realize, however, that since the new merchant-yangban class would
have to take the lead in promoting an ethical system that in Korea denigrated
merchant activity, they might have to the modify the hallowed Confucian canon
to bring it in line with contemporary Ch'ing practice.
As Kang Man 'gil pointed out, Yu's preference for maintenance of government
licensing of merchants was not a negative reaction to commercial development,
but a positive method for promoting not only the development of wealthy mer-
chants, capital accumulation, and urbanization, but also "bourgeois" leadership
in politics and government as well. Yu's "bourgeoisie," however, was not to be
based on maximum freedom and individual liberty to pursue gain and profit with-
out restriction; it was to be a class under government control that would coop-
erate with the government by paying commercial taxes and providing leadership
for local civic tasks based on communal norms.^4 In any case, his view for the
role of merchants in society represented a significant advance over the ideas of
the seventeenth century.
Cash Policy
Yu Suwon also considered methods of solving the recurrent cash shortages that
had occurred since the government stopped minting cash in 1697. He agreed
with the critique of some officials that the cash shortage had been caused by the
retention of cash reserves of capital and local civil and military agencies, but he
criticized their proposed remedy that the government be prohibited from stor-
ing any cash reserves at all because the agencies would still have to store their
savings or surpluses in some form. Unfortunately, cash was the only suitable
medium for storage because both grain and cloth would spoil. rot. or be eaten
by vermin over any period of time.
The best possible solution was to prohibit any "private" accumulation of
reserves in government offices because he believed that traditionally the gov-
ernment had been obliged to keep its tax resources in constant circulation. Even
though nine-years' savings from crop surpluses was the ideal reserve against
famine or crop disaster in ancient times, government granaries never kept their
reserves immobile but rotated them every year by using cash to buy grain on
the market for military rations and official salaries and then replenishing them
from the next year's tax receipts. Unfortunately. because the civil and military
agencies of the government were at present rigidly defending the benighted prin-
ciple of maintaining "immovable" (pongbudong) reserves, cash had been with-
drawn from circulation and its value had been driven up.
Yu also believed that cash had not been put into circulation and tended to grav-
itate into the treasuries of wealthy families because commercial activity had not
been fully developed, but the solution of many observers to ban rich merchants
from accumulating cash savings was also "laughable. " "Even the awe and majesty