Chapter 405: Gao Wen's Huge Plan

Hetty's question was expected by Gawain, and he knew that Hetty knew the answer - she asked the question on behalf of the others at the scene.

"Every one of us knows the strength of Cecil's leadership," Gawain looked around at everyone in the conference room, from Norris, the agricultural director, to Hammer, who was in charge of steel smelting, to the senior clerk of the government affairs office. With other department heads, these familiar faces are the witnesses and promoters of Cecil's growth to this day, "Then each of us should also know that Cecil's strength is based on the 'magic industrialization' As well as the basis of advanced social systems, it is based on an order that is different from the traditional aristocratic territory.

"Hossman and the 70,000 rabble he organized have collapsed. All the land nobles in the southern border are only attached to Cecil, and there are only three types left. One is being held in camps in the Hothman region and on the banks of the Whitewater, and the last is on the way to exile, and its destruction is only a matter of time. Then when these nobles and all their armies are gone, there will be four left in the whole South. More than a dozen unguarded, ungoverned ghost towns, Cecil will take over the lands and restore order on the lands - Cecil's way."

Gawain wants to establish a new order, and now that he is on the key road of unifying the entire southern border, he must extend Cecil's success to the entire southern border, and make the southern border a strong, stable, and integral Duchy of Cecil, not Let the more than 40 sub-feudal territories continue to operate in the same way as before, otherwise even if the people on those lands are loyal to him, he will just change a set of nobles for the entire southern border, and nothing has changed.

In any case, the foundations of the traditional aristocratic system in the South - land and population - must be changed from the root, and this war is an opportunity to change everything.

Gawain had considered two options.

The first plan is to migrate all the population of the entire southern border to the Cecil area, and finally form a large-scale densely populated area along the White Water River-Dark Mountains line, and build a powerful industrial empire on this basis, which can maximize the Give full play to the power of population in the industrial society, and let Cecil's magic industry develop to the next stage in the shortest time, but after roughly estimating the population of the entire southern border, I also investigated the distribution of various resources and urban geography in the southern border. After the position, he gave up this simple and crude plan.

Because the entire southern border has a population of several million (a rough estimate, it should actually be more), this number exceeds his expectations. This is due to the existence of extraordinary power, which makes the food production in this world relatively abundant, and the high physical quality of ordinary people, which also leads to a situation where the population of civilians is still very high even if their lives are difficult, even in the most desolate Ansu. In the poor and backward southern border, the number of people was enough to make Gawain's simple and crude first plan aborted.

Although Cecil has a relatively advanced social system and a rapidly developing magic industry, it is impossible to complete the migration, resettlement and transformation of a million-level population in a short period of time, even if the period of this plan is extended to three to five Year,

The enormous resources and social pressures generated by this massive population migration will also bring down Cecil.

Not to mention that this plan is equivalent to giving up more than 80% of the land in the southern border in a short period of time. When the population is all concentrated in the Baishui River-Dark Mountains area, what will happen to the resources and cultivated farmland in other areas of the southern border? Without those resource output and food production areas, Cecil's current level of development alone would not be able to support an industrial structure with a population of one million to be self-sufficient.

Therefore, Gawain can only choose the second set of plans, that is, only relocate the population in the southern region, let them build new industrial belts in the North Shore development area of ​​Cecil and on the east and west sides, and at the same time concentrate the population in other regions in the southern region. , through the establishment of a second-level government office, to build several new sub-level cities in other regions-due to the previous experience in forming a second-level government office in the Kant area, this plan has a very high feasibility.

And in this way, Gawain can also ensure control over most of the southern region, and the resources distributed in various parts of the southern region will be fully exploited and continuously injected into the giant beast of the Magic Industry.

Of course, the pressure to face this is still great, but Gawain has every reason to do it.

"Population migration, the establishment of a magic industry system similar to Cecil, and the construction of the experienced Cecil administrators to preside over the construction - creating a new order and promoting the development of magic industry is only one of the purposes, and the other purpose is to destroy The foundation on which the old aristocratic system lives."

Heidi was fascinated by Gawain's side, and immediately understood the meaning of his ancestors: "Is it land and population?"

"That's right," Gawain nodded, "it's not enough to ban or kill this group of landed aristocrats, as long as their land and population systems are still there, new landed aristocrats will appear sooner or later, so we must break the This system ensures that the old nobles never return."

The old aristocracy ensured the authority of the aristocratic system through the way of enfeoffing the land, while the land system that existed with the enfeoffment of the land ties the commoners firmly to those lands. In any matter, when Anzu was not stable, this kind of enfeoffment ensured the basic order of the entire country, but after the advent of the magic industry era, this situation of tying people to the land has become a shackle.

With the current agricultural model established by Cecil Land relying on large-scale industrial mass production of alchemy potions and centralized and efficient farming, a considerable number of agricultural populations can be transformed into industrial populations.

On the one hand, Gawain's population migration is a necessary means to build the magic industry, because a sufficient population with basic labor freedom is a prerequisite for ensuring productivity, and on the other hand, it is to completely destroy the living soil of those old nobles in the southern border.

Of course, saving management costs is also one of the reasons. After all, Cecil’s administrative power is limited, and the southern border is vast, and Gao Wen wants to establish the same advanced management system as Cecil in other areas of the southern border. management, it is necessary to change the current situation of sparsely populated and chaotic settlements.

Reasonably centralizing the population, redistributing land, and setting up more scientific and standardized urban and rural structures are all effective solutions.

Not everyone can fully understand Gawain's complete theory, but the people here have at least witnessed the process of Cecil's rise and how the new order in the territory works and works, and they understand the population The need for the migration turned the focus to the specific difficulties the grand plan faced.

Norris begins by asking the most realistic question: "What if farmers don't want to leave their land?"

In this era, land was a shackle and tool used by nobles to bind their subjects, but sadly, most of the commoners did not understand and agree with this. On the contrary, they would agree with this kind of restraint - peasants were unwilling to leave their land , this is an inevitable situation in almost any farming society. The liberated people are unwilling to accept your liberation. This is a problem that Gawain must face.

Even if you take a step back and say that people in this world don’t have many specific thoughts on “the homeland is hard to leave”, but rushing to force so many people to move will inevitably face huge resistance, even if according to Gawain’s second plan, he just let those people move. People move to the peripheries of the cities closest to them, and there is also great resistance from the commoners who hardly ever leave their villages in their entire lives.

The traditional aristocracy probably wouldn’t care about the resistance of the people, but Cecil’s rules couldn’t do that—Gawain must also take into account the social stability issue during population migration.

"First of all, population migration will be a long-term plan. I initially intend to complete it in three to five years, and this time can be extended," Gao Wen explained, "so we can carry out population migration in batches. We can use Sisi The experience at the time of the establishment of Ernest - firstly, the serfs and slaves were migrated, more than 80% of the serfs and slaves were the property of the lords and knights, and now they have become unowners, which is the easiest to migrate;

"Secondly, to ensure the supply of land, we can ensure that the migrant population has enough cultivated land to accept by means of land replacement, reclaiming new land, recovering old aristocratic estates and redistributing them, and ensuring that the entire southern border will not be affected in this process. Agricultural Production;

"Finally, pay attention to rewards and publicity and guidance. Everyone in the Political Affairs Office and your clerks should have some experience. We are not forcing civilians to leave their homes, but to prepare them a better new home. Becoming city citizens, having access to land from lords, and new lords redistributing properties to attract them and make them see the migration as an opportunity rather than a mandate can also keep things going.”

After Gawain finished speaking, Norris nodded again and again. As a farmer himself, he believed that the solutions proposed by Gawain were enough to deal with the vast majority of migrants.

In fact, even without these plans, it is possible to enforce the population relocation plan - the civilians of this era have an amazing tolerance for the lord's orders and various adversities. In many cases, the lord may only rely on a momentary good or bad mood You can order to prohibit the people of the whole territory from entering the mountains or order everyone not to go to the river to fish. If Gawain wants to force the population transfer, most of the civilians will just think that this is the whim of the new lord, and bite the bullet. Ya accepts the arrangement. After all, after this war, the Cecil family has actually become the absolute authority in the South.

It's just... Gawain didn't want to do that.

During the establishment stage of the Principality of Cecil, every blemish caused by everything he did would have to be made up for ten times or even a hundred times the cost in a few years, or even impossible to make up. understandable.

According to the existing experience, with the Druid potions produced by the alchemy factory, and the agricultural study meeting to allow farmers to exchange their high-yield skills, and with the advanced system, the food production in various places will be greatly improved. In this case, a large number of free populations can enter the factory, and an important part of the industrialization of magic will be there.

Hetty then raised another question: "Ancestors, the establishment of a second-level city hall still requires a lot of manpower, although the government affairs department has been making every effort to cultivate various administrative personnel, it can barely gather enough in the second-level government affairs hall to meet the needs of various supervisors. People, but in the more basic clerk and clerk positions, we may have a big gap, and we have to solve the problem of appeal... Although Cecil defeated the coalition of more than 40 nobles in the southern border, we have enough The power to take over the land of the nobles, but the administrative staff sent there did not have enough appeal in the local area. It would be fine if some soldiers were sent to control the order, but a unit like the second-level government office must be established... The local people are not necessarily will cooperate."

Then Hetty organized the language and added another point: "And also consider that there are still some areas where the remnants of the old lords are still waiting to destroy the problem - although the number may be small, but the impact of such destruction on social order huge."

"There will definitely be remnants of rebels, and there will be troops in this area to escort and clean up," Gawain nodded, "The issue of appeal does exist, so I have asked Byron and Philip to take the nobles and knights from the prisoner of war camp first. The captives are escorted back first, and I will have a good 'talk' with those people, and after they 'cooperate', we can also recruit intellectuals from all over the country and train them more easily, and the manpower gap can be alleviated."

Gawain is destroying the old aristocratic system in the southern border, but as he realized before—whether he wants to admit it or not, the vast majority of intellectuals and high-level talents in this era are concentrated among the nobles and their vassals. The new order, especially the establishment of a new order in a short period of time, he still has to find a way to borrow strength from these people.

Therefore, he wanted to destroy the old noble system, but he had to keep it—at least a part of the nobles and their vassals who were willing to cooperate and accept transformation, so that the resources they possessed could be put to use.