236 SOCIAL REFORMYu did not mean by his universal principle that "all men are the same" that
all men (let alone women) were equal before the law, equal sharers in the social
compact, or possessors of equal rights in the political community. Rather, he
meant that all men shared a common humanity that separated them from inan-
imate objects or chattel. Since only chattel or things could be the property of a
man, one man could not own another. Furthermore, from the standpoint of the
ruler it was improper to create artificial status categories as a basis of discrim-
ination, an argument totally at odds with the common justifications for status
(my()ngbun) in Korean society. IfYu did not invent this idea, he certainly played
an important role in popularizing it, and it was reiterated by King Sunjo in 180 I
in the decree that abolished official slavery.
Unfortunately, Yu's declaration of human equality lacked a classical prove-
nance, so he had to substitute a rather weak alternative, an ostensibly empirical
statement that in China the ancients were not used to measuring their wealth in
slaves as contemporary Koreans were wont to do. Even if true, this statement
was certainly no proof that chattel slavery did not exist in ancient China. On the
contrary, it implied that chattel slavery existed and was legitimate.
If he were looking merely for examples of the condemnation of slavery, he
could have cited Wang Mang, who usurped power from the last of the Former
Han emperors and established the Hsin dynasty in A.D. 9. Wang Mang had crit-
icized the slavery of the Ch'in period in harsh terms because it locked people
up in cattle pens and justified their inhumane treatment. 117 Perhaps he could not
bring himself to cite a usurper as an authority on moral principle (even though
Yi Ik, Yu's intellectual heir did so in the eighteenth century) and he would have
preferred a pre-Ch'in source if he could have found it.
The Confucian line on slavery in Korea in the late tenth century was that it
was necessary to the aristocracy, and in the early fifteenth century that it was
necessary for the preservation of the patrimony. It was no easy task for Yu to
find a tradition of antislavery thought in Confucian moral literature; he had no
choice but to create or invent a principle of human equality. Yet it is doubtful
that he really intended the immediate and total elimination of slavery from Korean
society, especially since in his chapters on education and land reform slave labor
was still to play an important role even after the abolition of private property
and the conversion to his so-called public land system (kongjon).
The Matrilineal Succession Law
Despite his articulation of the principle of the sameness of human beings whether
slave or commoner, Yu surprisingly proposed as his solution to the problem of
slavery the adoption of the matrilineal rule for status inheritance by children in
mixed commoner/slave maniages, the same solution that Song Siyol had offered
in his own time. J J R What distinguished Yu from the other advocates of this method
was his willingness to admit that the determination of the status of children of