EPILOGUE lOI3could make such concessions to existing privilege because of his commitment
to the propriety of hierarchical respect relations, and his sympathy for the mem-
bers of his own class.
His plan to refurbish the schools would only have provided for the body of
regular officials. He also had to cure the endemic corruption of the petty clerks
without elevating them to the same level as the regular officials. His solution
was to provide thcm with salaries through an improved system of taxation.
Whether guaranteed salaries for clerks would have eliminated corruption as Yu
hoped is something that one can never know because it was never tried, but it
would certainly have been an improvement over the existing situation.
Finally, at the lowest end of the bureaucracy, the local district, where the mag-
istrate and his irregular local clerks, village headman, and village officials came
into direct contact with the people, he hoped to overcome the damage done by
corrupt local officials by replacing them with semiautonomous institutions like
community compacts and village granaries, copied from models created in the
Sung dynasty. staffed by prominent men of virtue. Thcy were to take charge of
teaching villagers and common peasants to practice Confucian moral standards,
provide mutual aid, relief, and loans, and implement mutual surveillance against
criminals and wrongdoers.
Unfortunately, Yu's plan for the moral reformation of all levels of the bureau-
cracy was the least effective of all his ideas. The examination system was never
replaced by a refurbished school system and a serious and sustained method of
recommendation. A salary system for petty clerks was never instituted to the
end of the dynasty, and the community compacts were attempted only in a few
instances. Only the adoption of village autonomy for the administration of loans
was attempted undcr the Taewongun in the 1860s. Otherwise, local nonofficial
organizations wcre dominated almost exclusively by local yangban in protec-
tion of their own interests and local clerks were left unchecked to profit from
bribery.
Yu's recommendations for improvements in the economy, particularly the use
of metallic cash, did have some influence on the next century. When Yu began
to write his masterwork around 1650, active officials were already attempting
to introduce metallic currency to lubricate market transactions. Yu responded to
their initiative and sought to add some wisdom to it by consulting the Chinese
classics and histories.
Consulting the classics did not necessarily mean that he was conservatively
tied to backward economic ideas because what he found in those sources was
often more developed than contemporary practice in Korea. In fact, Chou China
appeared to have had a larger commercial sector than Korea, ccrtainly a more
advanced use of money. He found that industry and commerce were not evil, as
some ideologues believed, but necessary for the production and circulation of
items of utility among the population. It was just that they were secondary to
agricultural production and had to be limited lest the attractiveness of profit lured
too many pcasants from thc primary occupation of agricultural production.