SLAVERY 253He also quoted Wang Mang on the perversity of penning up people in slave
markets like animals (a statement Yu had either overlooked or omitted from his
study) and argued that a prohibition of purchase and sale would put an end to
this, limit the accumulation of slaves by slaveowners, force the idle rich to do
some work themselves, and prevent the current practice of false enslavement
of innocent country bumpkins by people who forged documents of purchase.
If, Yi conceded, some purchase and sale had to be allowed, then a time limit
should be placed on the terms of servitude and the requirements of service forced
on the slaves' heirs. Furthermore, no family should be allowed to own more
than one hundred slaves (a far from stringent encumbrance on the slavehold-
ing class, and approximately what had been proposed in 1414-15 under King
T'aejong); all the rest would be converted to men of good status. He said his
goal was to approximate contemporary Chinese laws on slavery.I?3
It seems safe to say that Yi Ik shared Yu's animus against slavery and echoed
his call for an end to inherited slavery, but he was somewhat more reluctant to
advocate an immediate and total abolition of slavery than Yu.
Yu SlIwiin. Yu Suwon was another eighteenth-century statecraft writer who
wrote a hook on statecraft. Usii, between I729 and '737. with extensive com-
ments on slavery. Like Yu Hyongwon he was a member of the Munhwa Yu clan
but politically aligned with the Disciple's Faction (Soron). Although a critic of
hereditary slavery, his position on slavery was less radical than Yu Hyongwon's.
He deplored the Kory6 practice of re-enslaving freedmen who either offended
their former masters or got involved in a dispute with their former master's rel-
atives, and he criticized the Kory6 rule that forced the descendants of manu-
mitted slaves to revert to slave status and prohibited descendants of slaves through
the eighth generation from holding office. He also opposed discrimination against
the nothoi of yang ban and slave concubines.
He remarked that even though slavery itself may have been legitimized by
Kija's law. Kija never specified the re-enslavement of redeemed or manumitted
slaves or any ban on officeholding by the descendants of slaves. He cited the
Book of History (Shu-ching) to the effect that punishments should not be
extended to one's heirs, and quoted a statement in the Tso-chuan that family
members were not to be [implicated in the crimes] of criminals. In contrast to
the benevolent laws of the sage kings of yore, in Korea offspring of merchants
and artisans as well as slaves were prohibited from officeholding, and slaves werc
treated with particularly cruel laws and never allowed to rise to good status. 174
Like Yu he criticized the dependency of the yangban aristocracy on slave labor
and explained that the reason why private slaves were not subject to state taxes
in Korea (i.e .. up to the institution of military service for them in 1593) was
because of the Kory6 custom of prohibiting the scholar-official class (sajok, i.e.,
yangban) from earning a living as merchants or artisans. whose offspring were
in any case prohibited from holding office. Since scholar-officials were not sup-
posed to work for a living. the state provided them with land grants varying in
amount according to rank.175 But he thought that this system had degenerated