Yu's COMMUNITY COMPACT REGULATIONS 739
through education (kyohwa) were never divided in two. In the Chou dynasty,
the local posts of Tsu-shih and Tang-cheng were responsible for education and
moral instruction as well as collecting taxes and commanding troops.
Since it was no longer possible to reestablish that kind of unity in local admin-
istrations because local officials were no longer autonomous officials (cha-
juch'ijigwan) but were all under the jurisdiction of the district magistrate
(suryong), and individual tasks were divided and distributed among the magis-
trate's subordinates, there was no choice in current times but to organize a sep-
arate community compact. He explained that although an attempt had been made
in the Sui dynasty to concentrate both administration and education in the hands
of one official like a Tang-cheng, it had not worked well. In Ming times, the
head of a one-hundred family group called the Li-cheng was given responsi-
bility to judge minor lawsuits, but he could not control bribery and murder that
arose from those disputes.
It did not work not only because the times were bad, but also because the sit-
uation had changed from the age of feudalism (ponggonsi). In the feudal Chou
period, the Tsu-shih (the teacher) and Tang-cheng (local administrator) were
selected on the basis of their moral worth and were given the official position
of taebu commensurate with those qualities. Ho Hsiu of Han times, author of a
subcommentary on the Kung-yang Commentary on The Spring and Autumn
Annals, mentioned that people of a eighty-family unit called the Ii established
a school and selected a man from among the honored and virtuous elders of the
community to run it. He was given the respected title of Father-Elder (ju-lao)
and a double land allotment, and was granted permission to ride a horse. Local
officials as a whole (hsiang ta~fu) were treated as if they were capital ministers,
and they were given audiences with the ruler of the state at court to discuss offi-
cial business and given responsibility for education in the provinces. The
respect the ancients had for learning was not confined exclusively to formal or
legal institutions alone.
After the destruction of feudalism and the institution of the bureaucratic sys-
tem in the Ch'in dynasty, the local magistrates (hyanggwan) were no longer
exalted, and it became difficult to find worthy men to be magistrates, let alone
headmasters of local schools. They were dropped down to the lowest bureau-
cratic ranks and afforded few marks of respect. Nevertheless, it was still possi-
ble to approximate the Chou situation by the division of labor, a principle that
had been followed in ancient times as well. The moral rectification of the pop-
ulation as well as good government could be achieved by cooperation among
officials, worthy scholars, and other officials, implying that establishment of the
community compact would provide the missing component of moral education
in local areas.
Yu argued that in contemporary Korea, as well, it was most important to find
worthy men to staff the posts of his Subdistrict Compact Association because
not many incumbent district magistrates were worthy or respected. The heads
of the compact (Yakchong) were obliged to rectify their own behavior to set a