Chapter 405 — Gao Yang's Grand Plan
Blade of Dawn · Page 4 of 4
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.