In the year 1743 the king put roofs upon the West and North-east Gates. Before that time they had been simply arches. He set on foot an agitation against the use of silk, and ordered that no more banners be made of that material. He utterly did away with the last remnant of the Soron party by an edict in which he stated that all who would go by that name were traitors. There was a popular superstition that the third and sixth on the list of successful candidates at the government examinations would soon die; so the examiners were careful to substitute other names, in case a friend or relative found himself in this awkward predicament. The king happened to see this done once and upon inquiry found that the names of two Song-do men were being substituted in place of those of some friends of the examiners. In anger he ordered the names to be all mixed up again, and that each man be made to run his chance of sudden death. One of his most salutary reforms was the doing away with the _mudang_ or sorceress class, who did and still do so much to corrupt the morals and degrade the manners of the Korean people. This period beheld the invention of the one-wheeled chair, but its use was always confined to the third official grade. A step backward was taken when it was decreed that no one above the ninth official grade could be beaten as punishment for crime. It tended to build up another barrier between the upper and lower classes. And yet it was not an unmixed evil, for a public beating must inevitably lower the dignity of the office that the culprit holds. There was such universal complaint against both the land and the poll taxes that the king put it to vote at a plebiscite called in Seoul in 1750, and the people voted unanimously for a house tax instead, and the king complied. The next year a grandson was born to him, who was destined to be his successor. He found it necessary to police the four mountains about Seoul to prevent the trees all being cut down. He built for the first time a fortification at the Im-jin River. In 1751 famines in different localities drove crowds of people to Seoul and the government was obliged to feed them; then the king’s mother died; then the queen died. The king said there must be some extraordinary cause for all these calamities. He believed it was because wine was being secretly used in the palace. It was denied, but he was incredulous and ordered that even in the ancestral sacrifices the use of wine be dispensed with and that water be used instead. The provincial general of Ham-gyŭng Province was convicted of having used wine and the king went outside the South Gate to see him executed. The culprit’s head was set on a pole in view of the populace. Following up the good work of doing away with sorcery, the king banished from Seoul all the blind exorcists.