Requesting That the People Be Told Not to Farm within Enemy Lines請令諸將曉諭人民勿爲入耕賊陣。啓

Looking of late at the arrangements of the border commanders, they are all used to a makeshift ease before their eyes and reckon nothing at all of what lies far ahead. This is utterly disheartening. The Japanese enemy are not of a kind with our people. Before this, our people looked on this enemy as on a fierce tiger or a snake or a scorpion and trembled at the mere mention of them; how much less would they have dared to live among them?

Therefore, when the Japanese enemy first entered our borders, though they sent their foul bands out by division to hold the districts and their force was very strong, our country's people, apart from those who stayed under the pressure of threats, all led away the old and the young and scattered into the mountain valleys, and none went in and attached themselves gladly. So although the enemy's force waxed strong, the hearts of the people were not drawn in; and this is the very root of recovering the country.

Now that the enemy have stayed long on the border and much time has passed, the killing and the cutting down has grown somewhat rarer; and they feign besides a soothing face, not encroaching on the people and supplying them with food. So the foolish people, who have lost their steady nature and are worn with hunger, already lead one another thither in disorder, and it cannot be stopped. They plow for them and render them taxes and furnish their corvée without shame, and as the days and the months pass they have nearly become one with them, to the point of mutual forgetting.

It is said that in Dongnae (東萊), Busan (釜山), Gimhae (金海) and such places the plows fill the fields, and that two in three of them are our country's people. Some have even shaved their heads and blackened their teeth and follow their customs; and traders from distant places come and go in the enemy's camps, each with his own goods, buying and selling with them, and there is no boundary at all to block and divide them. Nothing in all this business is more disheartening than this. And as for why the enemy linger year after year, gathering their troops and storing their strength, where their cunning design lies may also be guessed at.

Now, though the enemy say aloud that they will withdraw their troops, how are their words to be trusted? The various commanders, giving no thought to this, would send the people into places near the enemy's camps to go in and plow. What reasoning is this? No sooner was this word out than the enemy of the Left and the Right Provinces at once bored into it with artful designs and spread their snaring stratagems wide, while the Field Marshal (元帥) too seems not to perceive it. They have even had an old man of Ulsan (蔚山) go to the enemy's chief and bring back an agreement, and it is said that by the letter the enemy chief Hwipal (喜八) sent, he would lend both seed and farming provisions as much as is wished for.

They would lend without cause to our people the provisions they have carried a thousand li by sea. Is this loving us? Is this saving us? Their inward reckoning is not hard to know. Four years into the raising of arms, our country's people are worn with levies and corvée and flounder with nothing on their backs, and truly, if there is any place where they may eat, they would not refuse to leap into water or fire. How should the foolish people be let to hear these words of the enemy?

It is heard that of the people of Honam (湖南) and such parts, those who have drifted of late into Miryang (密陽) and thereabouts come on and on with children on their backs. The enemy's envoy Yosira (要時羅), coming to Kim Eung-seo's (金應瑞) camp and seeing this, is said to have remarked, "Be sure to sow and tend it well. If the peace is not made, it shall rightly become our feed." Their design may be seen in this. How much more if we drive the people in besides? Now in Gyeongsang Province the land is broad and the people few, and there is no worry of lacking land to plow; why must the people be driven into the enemy's camps before there can be any plowing at all?

The nature of the Japanese is foul and cunning and hard to fathom, and their fierceness and venom are got from their inborn nature, so that even to their own kind they cut and kill as if mowing grass. That they should have a kindly intent toward our people alone is not so in one case out of ten thousand. In days past the people of the capital, not knowing at first that harm would come, went in and lived among them, and in the space of a single night the whole city became meat for them; this is the clear proof of what has already been.

Let the commanders and the officials admonish the people always in this sense, so that they do not cast themselves into the fierce tiger's maw; and let boundaries be set strictly and the roads of coming and going cut off; and let those who have fallen to the enemy be widely called back and comforted, so that the enemy's cunning design is in the end not carried out. The further particulars of how it is to be arranged cannot all be laid out at length in words; it lies only in the one charged with the business weighing it in silence and handling it well. Would it not be well to make this known in secret, separately, to the Supreme Field Marshal and to the Circuit Commissioners and the Army Commanders of the Left and the Right Provinces?