698 REFORM OF GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION
and the pattern of behavior generally corresponded to the phase of the dynastic
cycle. After the establishment of a dynasty when morale was high, the orders
of the king were respected, the bureaucracy was staffed with a new complement
of officials, and corruption was not a major issue, but in a period of decline offi-
cials were demoralized and prone to further their own fortunes at public expense.
Yu Hyongwon was obviously living in an age when the morality of the officials
and clerks could not be trusted, and unfortunately, that mood persisted and became
progressively worse in the nineteenth century.
Yu believed that loans to the poor became a tool of oppression in the hands
of the district officials because of the nature and spirit of the bureaucracy, cer-
tainly in his own time, and that the ever-normal granary system could not be
used by officials to punish innocent peasants because it was only involved in the
purchase and sale of goods to stabilize market prices. The ever-normal system
did not jeopardize ordinary people by making them liable for criminal action as
the failure to repay a government loan obviously did.If you [adopt] the ever-normal system, then in bumper crop years no harm is
done to agriculture [the peasant producers who will benefit from an artificial
increase in the price of grain], and when there is famine, no injury is done to the
people [the consumers who will benefit from an artificial reduction of the price
of grain]. Those above and below are benefited, and there are no evil effects to pri-
vate or public [interests]. What is good about this law is nothing more than this.
Since the grain that is received year after year [by the officials] in the hwanja
loan system is basically grain that the families of the people should be saving
[on their own], [that grain] no longer represents a surplus to be used to provide
a supplement for food during a crop failure. I only see that the system harasses
the people, eats into their property, and provides opportunities to the clerks for
corruption. It truly provides no benefit either to public or private [interests]. Its
disadvantages are clear, but if people still have doubts about whether it should
be abolished, it is only because they have become used to what is now an estab-
lished custom and cannot see what is right before their eyes.4SNot only were hwanja state loans corrupt, but there was no precedent for their
existence in Chinese antiquity and there was no record, to his knowledge, of
their use in the Liao-tung area of Manchuria, "and yet the people all had enough,
enjoyed prosperous times, and were saved from starvation [during famine]." For
that matter, the hwanja loans had never been used in Seoul and should be kept
out at all costs because it would only add extra work for the capital bureaus and
draw the capital population into the snares of criminal violations.^46
Yu indicated that some people raised objections to his appeal to abolish the
hwanja loans altogether because it would strip the local districts of funds that
had to be used for military costs and official expenses. Yu retorted that since the
funds for the hwanja system came from the portion of national taxes kept on
reserve in the magistrate's yamen (the yuse), they were already derived from the