572 MILITARY REFORMmade complex. however. because the eighteenth-century statecraft scholars by
no means treated the ideas of their predecessors as if they were unassailable dogma.Yi Ik (Songho)One of the most prominent of the next generation was Yi Ik (pen name, Sangha),
who in one respect came even closer to the classical ideal on military service
than Yu because he insisted that physical labor was the only proper mode of ful-
filling the service obligation. "Labor service means personal service because in
wartime, the one thing you cannot dispense with is physicallabor."2 Although
he conceded that the practice of substituting cloth payments for service was under-
standable because of the desire of individual servicemen to escape the onerous
burdens of traveling back and forth to their duty stations, providing rations, and
doing patrol duty. he insisted that substitute cloth taxes violated the basic pur-
pose of what a soldier was supposed to be. The only solution was to abolish
cloth paymcnts altogether and return to rotating service."
On the other hand, Yi lk could see what Yu Hyongwon could not, that the sys-
tem of support taxpayers was by no means sanctioned by the classics, and he
advocated that all the support taxpayers of the Forbidden Guard and Royal Divi-
sions should be abolished or converted to soldiers. He felt that it was bad enough
to use support taxpayers to provide cloth or grain to duty soldiers, but even more
absurd to have support taxpayers for soldiers who were off duty. He contra-
dicted Yu again when he argued that the proper way to finance soldiers was by
the use of the land tax, based on what he called the classical precedent of "mak-
ing the land tax responsible for supporting soldiers. I have never heard that [men
liable for military scrvicc] had to pay additional rice for troop rations." Yi was
right in saying that the support tax method of finance had no classical justifi-
cation, and he was more flexible than Yu in arguing for a land tax to t1nance the
military, but he was hardly on firm ground in arguing for a classical precedent
for a military land tax.~
On the other hand. as Han Woo-keun has pointed out. Yi Ik was less radical
in his treatment of the yangban than Yu because he felt that it was no longer pos-
sible to reestablish the Five Guards system or the principle of service for all men,
including scions of the scholar-official class, that supposedly prevailed in the early
Choson period. He took this position partially because of the classical require-
ment that support of a class of scholar-officials (sa) was necessary even though
it might conflict with the state's need for soldiers. Yu Hyongwon shared this view,
but he also believed that in classical times military knowledge and skill was part
of the education and training of the well-rounded scholar-gentleman and some
form or service was required of the social elite. He also felt that the Five Guards
system of early Chason had incorporated these classical principles.
Yi Ik, by contrast. argued that the population had grown so large by his time
that had it not been for the reduction of the men of good status to no more than
a tenth of the population by tax evasion and corruption, there would be more