INFLATION AND DEFLATION 963
the market itself. YOngjo, in fact, endorsed this argument even though it would
mean that restored stability would ensure the continuation of cash rather than
its elimination. These were significant concessions from a king who began his
reign as a reactionary opponent not ani y of cash, but also of progress in the com-
mercial or nonagricultural industrial sectors of the economy.
Yongjo's conservatism was not simply the product of the uneducated mind,
because the most renowned statecraft scholar after Yu Hyongwon, Yi lk, also
shared his moral bias against cash. There could be no better example to disprove
the notion that the nonofficial statecraft scholars necessarily represented a thor-
oughly progressive and developmental cIass of thinkers just because they spent
more time studying the issues than most officials did.
When Yongjo finally capitulated and agreed to mint more cash in 1731, he
was forced to do so by another of the frequent famines and crises in state finances
that plagued the last half of the dynasty, not simply by his acquiescence to the
virtues of superior argument. Furthermore, throughout the debate that began in
I726, a number of officials made serious arguments for multiple-denomination
cash, paper money, and interest-rate limitation that took the level of debate far
above the simple, "penny-cash" mentality ofYu Hyongwon. but because Yongjo
was not positively disposed to seek new and progressive solutions to monetary
problems, he refused to adopt any of them. Had he possessed even a modicum
of the more adventurous spirit of Kings lnjo, Hyojong, and Sukchong, he might
have given any or all of these ideas a try.
For that matter, there was no further development to the use of paper money,
bills of credit, or banking. Even multiple-denomination metallic cash was not
attempted until 1867, and because it depreciated quickly and caused inflation
in commodity prices, it was quickly abandoned - not because it was intrinsi-
cally susceptible to such a development, but because the Taewongun was pri-
marily concerned with raising revenue and ignorant of the need for restraining
the money supply. Even though the volume of copper cash in circulation
increased appreciably after it was first introduced in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, by the nineteenth century its condition and quality had deteriorated. Adul-
teration by counterfeiters and lack of sufficient uniformity and dependability
made it unusable for financing foreign trade with Japanese and other foreign-
ers after r 876,38