Chapter 405 — Gao Yang's Grand Plan

In this age, land was the shackle and the tool by which nobles bound their subjects, but the sorrow of it was that most commoners neither understood nor accepted this. On the contrary, they identified with that bondage; peasants did not want to leave their land. This was all but inevitable in any agrarian society — the liberated do not want to accept your liberation. This was a problem Gao Yang had to face.

Even putting it another way — the people of this world had little concrete notion of "being attached to one's native soil" — abruptly forcing so many people to move would inevitably meet with enormous resistance. Even under Gao Yang's second plan, which moved them only to the outskirts of the nearest city, those commoners who in all their lives would scarcely ever leave their villages would still feel great resentment.

Traditional nobles probably would not care about the people's resentment, but Cecil's rules forbade doing things that way, and Gao Yang also had to consider the question of social stability during the migration.

"First, population migration will be a long-term plan. I intend at the outset to complete it within three to five years, and even that can be extended," Gao Yang explained. "So we can carry it out in batches. We can use the experience from when Cecil was founded: move the serfs and slaves first. More than eighty percent of the serfs and slaves were the property of lords and knights; now they have become people without a master, and they are the easiest to move.

"Second, ensure the land supply. Through land exchange, the clearing of new ground, and the reclaiming and redistribution of the old nobles' estates and properties, we can ensure that the migrants have enough farmland to receive them, and that the South's overall agricultural production is not affected in the process.

"Finally, focus on incentives and guided publicity. Everyone in the civil administration, and the clerks under you, should already have some experience with this. We are not trying to force commoners to leave their homes; we mean to prepare a better new home for them — to draw them in with talk of becoming townspeople, of receiving land granted by the lord, of new lords redistributing estates — to make them see population migration as an opportunity rather than a compulsory order. That will also let everything proceed smoothly."

When Gao Yang finished, Norris nodded again and again. A man of peasant stock himself, he judged that the proposals Gao Yang had put forward were already enough to handle the great majority of the migrating population.

In fact, even without these plans, the migration could have been enforced. The commoners of this age had an astonishing capacity for endurance where their lords' orders and every kind of hardship were concerned. Often a lord might, purely on the whim of a moment's mood, order that no one in the entire domain enter the mountains, or command that no one go fishing in the river. Had Gao Yang forced population migration through, most commoners would probably have thought it was just another new lord's passing fancy, then gritted their teeth and accepted the arrangements. After all, following this war, the Cecil family had in fact become the absolute authority of the South.

Only... Gao Yang was not willing to do it that way.

In the founding stage of the Duchy of Cecil, every stain left by each thing he did would, some years later, have to be made up for at ten or even a hundred times the cost — or might never be made up at all. He understood very well the gains and losses at stake.

Experience had shown that with the Druid potions produced by the alchemical factories, with the agricultural study society that let farmers exchange their high-yield techniques, and with an advanced system besides, grain yields everywhere would rise enormously. With grain in ample supply, the concentrated masses of free population could enter the factories — and a crucial link of arcane industrialization would be in place.

Hetty then raised another question: "Ancestor, establishing the second-tier municipal halls will require a great deal of manpower. The civil administration has been training administrative personnel of every kind at full stretch, and can just barely scrape together the people needed for the various department heads in the second-tier halls, but in the more basic posts — clerks, petty officials — I am afraid we will face a very large gap. And we also have to solve the question of standing... Although Cecil defeated the allied armies of more than forty nobles of the South, and we have strength enough to take over their lands, the administrators we send will not have sufficient standing among the locals. Sending some soldiers to keep order would be all right, but to set up units like second-tier civil administration halls... the locals will not necessarily cooperate."

Then Hetty gathered her thoughts and added one more point: "And we must also consider that in some areas there are still diehard remnants loyal to the old lords, watching for a chance to do damage. Their numbers may not be large, but this kind of sabotage has an enormous impact on social order."

"There will certainly be remnant resistance, and the army will provide protection and carry out clearing operations in that regard," Gao Yang nodded. "The question of standing does exist as well, so I have already had Byron and Philip send the noble and knight captives from the prisoner camps back first. I will have a good 'talk' with those people, and once they 'cooperate', it will be all the easier for us to recruit educated people from all over and train them, and the manpower gap can be eased."

Gao Yang was in the midst of destroying the South's old noble system, but as he had realized before, whether he liked to admit it or not, the great majority of the educated and upper-tier talent of this age was concentrated among the nobles and their dependents. To build a new order — especially to build one in a short time — he still had to find a way to borrow strength from those people.

So he had to destroy the old noble system, yet could not but preserve — at least preserve the portion of the nobles and their dependents who were willing to cooperate and willing to accept reform — so that the resources in their hands might be put to use.