Hetty's question was expected by Gawain, and he knew that Hetty also knew the answer. She asked this question on behalf of other people present.
"Every one of us knows the strength of the Cecil Territory," Gawain looked around at everyone in the meeting room, from Norris, the director of agriculture, to Hamel, who was in charge of steel smelting, to the senior clerk of the government affairs office And other department heads, these familiar faces are the witnesses and promoters of Cecil's growth, "Then each of us should also know that Cecil's strength is based on the 'magic industrialization' As well as the basis of the advanced social system, it is based on an order different from the traditional aristocratic territories.
"Hosman and the 70,000 mob he organized have collapsed, and all the land nobles in the southern border, except those who are dependent on Cecil, are left with three types. One has died in the artillery fire of the Crushed Stone Ridge and the White Water River. One kind of prisoner-of-war camp is being held in the Housman area and the banks of the Whitewater River, and the last one is on the way to exile. There are more than a dozen empty cities that are unguarded and unruled, and Cecil will take over these lands and rebuild the order on the land in Cecil's way."
Gao Wen wants to establish a new order, and now he is on the key path of unifying the entire southern border. He must extend Cecil's success to the entire southern border, making the southern border a strong, stable, and integrated Principality of Cecil, instead of Let the more than forty subdivided territories continue to operate in the same way as before, otherwise, even if the people in those lands are loyal to him, he will just change a noble team for the entire southern border, and nothing will change.
In any case, the land and population that are the foundation of the traditional aristocratic system in the southern border must be fundamentally changed, and this war is an opportunity to change everything.
Gao Wen once considered two options.
The first plan is to move all the population of the entire southern border to the Cecil area, and eventually form a large-scale densely populated area on the line of Whitewater River-Dark Mountains, and build a powerful industrial empire on this basis, so that the greatest extent can be achieved. Give full play to the power of population in 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, and investigating the distribution of various resources in the southern border, urban geography After the position, he gave up this simple and crude plan.
Because the entire southern border has a population of several million (roughly estimated, it should actually be more), this number exceeded his expectations. This is due to the existence of extraordinary power, which makes the food output of this world relatively abundant, and the physical fitness of ordinary people is relatively high, which also leads to a situation where the population of civilians is still very high even though the lives of ordinary people are difficult, even in the most desolate Ansu In the poor and backward southern border, the number of people is enough to abort Gao Wen's simple and rude first plan.
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 cycle of this plan is extended to three to five years. Years, the huge resources and social pressure generated during this large-scale population migration process will also wear 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 Baishuihe-Dark Mountains area, what will happen to the resources and reclaimed farmland in other parts of the southern border? Without those resource output and food production areas, Cecil's current development rate alone cannot support the self-sufficiency of an industrial structure with a population of one million.
Therefore, Gao Wen could only choose the second plan, which is to only relocate the population in the southern region, and let them build a new industrial belt in the northern coast development area of Cecil and the east and west sides, and at the same time concentrate the population in other areas in the southern region. , Through the establishment of a second-level government affairs office, several second-level new cities will be built in other regions. Due to the previous experience in establishing a second-level government affairs office in the Kant area, this plan is quite feasible.
And in this way, Gao Wen can still ensure the control of most of the southern border, and the resources distributed in various parts of the southern border will be fully developed and continuously injected into the body of the giant magic industry.
Of course, there is still a lot of pressure to face in this way, but Gao Wen has every reason to do so.
"Population migration, the establishment of a magic industry system similar to Cecil, and the establishment of a new order by experienced Cecil administrators, and the promotion of the development of magic industry are only one of the purposes. The other purpose is to destroy the old nobles. The foundation upon which the system rests.”
Hetty followed Gawain's ears and eyes, and immediately understood the meaning of her ancestors: "Is it the land and the population?"
"That's right," Gao Wen nodded, "It's not enough to just ban or kill this group of landed nobles. As long as their land and population system remains, new landed nobles will appear sooner or later, so we must break the law." This system ensures that the old nobles never come back."
The old aristocracy ensured the stability of the authority of the aristocratic system through enfeoffment of land, and the land system that existed with the enfeoffment of land firmly tied the common people to those lands. In any case, when the Ansu Kingdom 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 became a shackle.
With the current agricultural model established by the Cecil Territory relying on large-scale industrial mass production of alchemy potions and concentrated and efficient farming, a considerable number of agricultural populations can be transformed, and it is necessary to transform them into industrial populations.
On the one hand, Gao Wen's population migration is a necessary means to build the magic industry, because a sufficient population with basic freedom of labor is a prerequisite for ensuring productivity, and on the other hand, it is to completely destroy the living soil of the old nobles in the southern border.
Of course, saving management costs is also part of the reason. After all, Cecil’s administrative power is limited, and the southern border has a vast area. What Gao Wen wants to establish in other areas of the southern border is the same advanced management system as Cecil’s, so as to realize this in the entire southern border. To improve the level of management, it is necessary to change the current situation of vast land, sparse population and chaotic structure of settlements.
Reasonable concentration of population, redistribution of land, and setting up a more scientific and standardized urban and rural structure 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 also witnessed how the new order in the territory takes effect and operates. They understand the population The necessity of relocation turns the focus on the specific difficulties faced by this grand plan.
Norris begins by asking the most practical question: "What if farmers don't want to leave their land?"
In this era, the land is the shackles and tools used by the nobles to restrain the people, but the sad thing is that most common people don't understand and agree with this. On the contrary, they will agree with this kind of bondage. It is almost an inevitable situation in any farming society. The liberated are not willing to accept your liberation. This is a problem that Gao Wen must face.
Even if we take a step back, people in this world don't have many specific thoughts about "the homeland is hard to leave", but rashly forcing so many people to move will inevitably face huge resistance, even if according to Gao Wen's second plan, he just let those people When people move to the periphery of the city closest to them, those civilians who will hardly leave the village for a lifetime will also have a lot of resistance.
Traditional aristocrats probably wouldn't care about the public's resistance, but according to Cecil's rules, Gawain couldn't do that. He also had to consider social stability in population migration.
"First of all, population migration will be a long-term plan. I initially intend to complete it within three to five years, and this time can be extended," Gao Wen explained, "so we can carry out population migration in batches. It can be used by Sisi According to the experience when Er was established, the serfs and slaves were first relocated. More than 80% of the serfs and slaves were the property of the lords and knights. Now they have become ownerless people, which is the easiest to relocate;
"Secondly, to ensure land supply, we can ensure that the relocated population has enough arable land to accommodate them through land replacement, reclaiming new land, recovering old noble estates, and redistributing them. Agricultural Production;
"Finally, pay attention to rewards and publicity and guidance. Everyone in the Government Affairs Office and your clerks should have some experience. We are not trying to force civilians to leave their homes, but to prepare them for a better new home. Being city citizens, getting land from lords, new lords redistributing estates and so on to attract them, making them think that population migration is an opportunity rather than a mandate, that also makes things work smoothly."
After Gao Wen finished speaking, Norris nodded again and again. As a farmer himself, he thought that these plans proposed by Gao Wen were enough to deal with most of the migrant population.
In fact, even without these plans, it is possible to enforce the population migration plan. In this era, the civilians have amazing tolerance for the orders of the lords and various adversities. In many cases, the lords may be able to just rely on the momentary mood. Orders prohibiting the people of the entire territory from entering the mountains or ordering everyone not to go fishing in the river. If Gao Wen wants to force population migration, most of the commoners will think that this is just another whim of the new lord, and then accept it with gritted teeth. Arrangement, after all, after this war, the Cecil family has de facto become the absolute authority in the southern border.
It's just... Gao Wen didn't want to do that.
During the establishment of the Principality of Cecil, every stain caused by everything he did would cost ten times or even a hundred times the cost to make up for it in a few years, and it was even impossible to make up for it. understandable.
According to previous experience, with the druid potion produced by the alchemy factory, and the agricultural learning meeting to allow farmers to exchange their high-yield skills, combined with the advanced system, the grain production in various places will be greatly improved. Under certain circumstances, a large number of free populations can enter the factory, and an important part of the industrialization of magic will be completed.
Hetty then raised another question: "Ancestor, the establishment of a second-level city hall still requires a lot of manpower. Although the government affairs department has been doing its best to train various administrative personnel, it can barely gather enough staff for various supervisors in the second-level government affairs department. people, but we are afraid that there will be a big gap in the relatively basic clerk and clerk positions, and we have to solve the problem of appeal... Although Cecil defeated the coalition forces of more than forty nobles in the southern border, we have enough The strength is to take over the land of those nobles, but the administrative personnel sent there do not have enough appeal in the local area. It is okay to send some soldiers to control order, but to establish a unit like the second-level government affairs office... the locals may not cooperate. .”
Then Hetty organized the language and added one more point: "Also, we must also consider that in some areas there are still remnants of the old lord's loyalists waiting for opportunities to destroy them. Although the number may not be large, this kind of destruction has a huge impact on social order. "
"There will definitely be remnants of the rebels, and there will be troops to protect and suppress them," Gao Wen nodded, "The problem 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, I will have a good 'talk' with those people, and after they 'cooperate', we can also recruit and train intellectuals from all over the world more conveniently, and the manpower gap can be alleviated."
Gao Wen is destroying the old aristocratic system in the southern border, but as he realized before, whether he wants to admit it or not, most of the intellectuals and upper-class talents in this era are concentrated among the aristocrats and their vassals. If he wants to establish a new order , especially to establish a new order in a short period of time, he still has to find a way to borrow strength from these people.
So he wants to destroy the old noble system, but he has to keep at least some nobles and their vassals who are willing to cooperate and accept transformation, so that the resources they have come in handy.