Weeding Out Unfit Magistrates to Revive the Weakened Districts請澄汰不治守令以蘇淺邑。啓

Your servant, being in the capital, has had no word whether the magistrates of the four provinces in his charge are worthy or not. When the aide-de-camp Han Jungyeom (韓浚謙) went down some while ago, your servant had him go in and out among the people, seek out and hear the particulars, measure them against actual conduct, and write up a report on the one or two whose misgovernment was worst.

Now, according to the report Han Jungyeom has submitted: Yeo Eungju (呂應周), magistrate of Gangnyeong in Hwanghae Province, is a man of slight substance and low repute, young in years and unpractised in affairs, so that the business of the district takes no shape; and Gangseo, a district of Pyeongan Province, is withered and ruined worst of all, the grain in its storehouses being wholly spent so that it is on the way to becoming an abandoned district, while the magistrate Jo Hyonam (趙孝男) is a young military man who, on the strength of one occasion's war merit, suddenly took on this charge, the man and the vessel not matching, so that there is no hoping at all that he will raise what is weakened or mend what is amiss.

Both these districts are weakened and ruined ground, and if even in their magistrates no fit men are got, before long they will become abandoned ground. What Han Jungyeom wrote up and submitted he saw with his own eyes, and so it is not the same as rumour going about. How would it be to dismiss Yeo Eungju and Jo Hyonam, and, without regard to whether the man be a civil official, a military official, or one come in by namhaeng (南行), to choose out well and send down men who are attentive, honest and careful?