240 SOCIAL REFORMof hired rather than slave labor, as an egalitarian society. On the contrary, Chi-
nese men of position, status, and wealth merely used their wealth to employ as
many servants and laborers as they could afford without any disruption of the
proprieties of social status and order.
How many hired laborers people employed was only a function of their wealth.
Large landowners and high officials with large salaries could employ hundreds
or thous<mds of hired laborers. or ordinary people might employ only a few. In
any case, hired labor did not interfere with proper distinctions of social status
in the homes of the high officials. And in the homes of the ordinary villagers,
the employers treated the hired laborers like their own children, and people who
had many sons even gave some to others to be their hired workers.
If he had had more firsthand knowledge of hired labor in Korea, rather than
secondhand hearsay about China, he would have realized that hired laborers were
already treated as subordinate members of a family, especially those on annual
contracts like the mosilm -let alone the so-called sej()n kwanha or hereditary
hired laborers in Hamgyong Province in the northeast who had been forced into
virtual slavery by the powerful landlords there, or the hired laborers of Cholla
and other provinces who were locked up behind walls when they were not work-
ing, as if they were in forced labor camps. By no means were slaves the only
persons used to do hard and demeaning physicallabor.^129
In any case, Yu argued that the Chinese version of hired labor could be read-
ily adapted to Korea, even after his ideal program for nationalization of prop-
erty and equal distribution to peasant families had been adopted. He insisted
that his own program for reform was designed to bring the hierarchy of wealth
into accordance with the hierarchy of virtue and status, contrary to the existing
system of hereditary property and inherited status. Otherwise. his reforms would
not change any other customs and practices that were currently in use.1jD
The advantage of the hired labor system would be that it would provide for
just and humane treatment of workers in the employ of the families of status
and wealth, allow them the freedom of choice to remain unemployed, or if they
did decide to work for wages, set limits on the term of service. Yu had never
been to China, which explains why he obviously idealized labor relations there,
but he believed that hired laborers in China had the choice to work or not as
they wished, but once they did agree to work for a family, "they do not dare vio-
late [the orders of the head of the family J even in the slightest, and this is because
there are state laws [governing their behavior J." I}I
It is obvious that the prevailing belief among the majority of the social elite
of Korea was that slavery was by no means incompatible with Confucian prin-
ciples of interpersonal respect relations. Some felt that it was even consonant
with, if not necessary to, the Confucian concepts of the proper distinction between
noble and base and the hierarchical organization of society. Although Yu
opposed slavery, it did not mean that he was committed to the principle of equal-
ity, despite his declaration that all men were "of the same kind." In fact, he
insisted that social stratification could be maintained even if slavery were replaced