642 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
sixteenth century, chief clerks (not low-ranking clerks) were regarded as equals
in status with sons of high officials and lower degree holders and could take the
examinations or transfer to a regular appointment after their clerk service to the
sixth rank. He was not willing to restore the early Choson system when clerks
had more prestige because he claimed that it was unprecedented for clerks to
be regarded as equals of officials in Chou times. It was more likely, however,
that he believed, with some others of his time, that a distinction had to be made
according to the training and level of education of functionaries. He preferred
to accept a fundamental division between regular and irregular officials (con-
trary to the criticism of that practice by Ma Tuan-lin) but rectify it by improv-
ing the professional qualifications of the clerks and establishing their own
hierarchy of merit. 75
Onee men had chosen to make a career as a clerk, they were to be recruited
by different methods than those used to recruit regular officials (examination
versus recommendation) and confined to the system of service personnel. His
attitude toward clerks betrayed his favor for the generalists of liberal arts and
his prejudice against technical and clerical specialists. Han Yong'u has attrib-
uted this attitude to the bias of the mid-dynastic Neo-Confucians, rather than
the atmosphere of the early fifteenth century, but these biases that Han has men-
tioned did not necessarily coincide with all ofYu Hyongwon's attitudes. In fact,
some Neo-Confucians of the late fifteenth century were opposed to some ofYu's
favorite ideas: greater power for the throne and greater centralization of the
bureaucracy, equality of treatment toward military as well as civil officials, and
wider opportunity for officeholding among men of all types. Yu opposed the
privileges of the yangban class and hoped to raise the qualifications and status
of clerks by professionalizing their jobs, but he still intended to keep them sep-
arate from the superior class of regular officials who would have undergone half
a lifetime of study and training in the "liberal arts" and generalized education
in the school systcm.1^6
Yu hoped to eliminate the use of slaves for government service as runners or
clerks by his gradual methods of reform, but until slavery disappeared or was
abolished outright he hoped to bring raise the status, pay, and treatment of slaves
to the level of commoners. No matter what their status, runners would be pro-
vided with regular salaries by the state to eliminate the main reason for corrup-
tion and inefficiency. He would also have abolished the use of uncompensated
child labor for the boy servants that waited on the officials and converted that
position to a regular post as well. There is little doubt that his proposals would
have achieved a significant and major reform of the lower bureaucracy.
Yu's comprehensive plans for government reorganization was marked by a
spirit of rational reform and planning, but he never asserted the primacy and
superiority of the individual intellect as a higher standard than history and mores.
His rational powers were always limited by respect for tradition in education,
marriage practices, male dominance, and the monolithic bureaucratic structure,
but he would have carved away waste, sloth, inefficiency, corruption, and undue