Iron Powder and Spellcaster

"politics!"

When the mendicant monk said this word, Winters completely lost interest in the conversation.

"Bullshit politics." The second lieutenant stationed in the town threw his boots away with a bad attitude, and the soles of the boots hit the floor with two thuds: "There are bullshit politics in such a small place!"

"Wherever there are people, there is politics. Even in this small room, there is politics." Brother Rhett stroked his beard and said with a smile: "You represent the authority of the military in Langtun, and I am a member of the Catholic Church." Preacher at the bottom, isn’t this politics? Since there is politics between you and me, then naturally there is also politics in Langtun Town.”

Winters subconsciously wanted to refute, but he felt that what the other party said made sense.

"So an old bastard is giving me political lessons? Ridiculous." Winters dismissed it and started to make the bed to get ready for bed.

He didn't notice that Brother Rhett's attitude had unconsciously softened a lot compared to when he first entered the bedroom.

"Young man, I want to correct one of your ideas." This level of sarcasm obviously couldn't hurt the mendicant monk's face. The old man said with a smile: "Although I am a magic stick, I am your magic stick."

"When did you become 'my' stickman?" Winters asked.

The old monk replied in a matter-of-fact tone: "Of course it was when you hired me, wasn't it you who paid me my salary?"

"You have the nerve to say that? Have you ever done even a little bit of work as a scribe?" Winters crossed his arms and sat on the bed, deliberately using the honorific title and said sarcastically: "Mayor Mitchell, how dare you bother me? You, a living saint, aren't you still doing the paperwork? You eat and live in the Mitchells' house, and you get a free salary. To be honest, I want to change seats with you. "

"Some people become scribes because they only know how to copy. The reason why I don't do copying is exactly the opposite." The old mendicant monk was not ashamed to shirk his work at all. He said with great sincerity: "If I do the copying work, It’s like someone is wasting your resources, and of course I can’t allow this to happen.”

"You can really say such shameless words!" Winters was shocked.

The old man said unhurriedly: "Mr. Second Lieutenant, power needs the assistance of knowledge to operate. Why do imperial officials in the Far East hire scholars as their staff? Why do your noble lords hire priests as consultants? It's all the same. For you For me, my value does not lie in chores such as copying and calculating accounts, but in providing knowledge that you do not have."

"What knowledge?"

"Political Knowledge."

Winters sighed: "Brother Rhett, it's getting late, please go back and rest."

"Let me ask you a question, your Excellency, the resident official." The old monk showed no intention of leaving: "Do you know why the people on the plateau call this place new land?"

Winters thought for a moment and guessed based on the literal meaning: "Because it is newly reclaimed land?"

"Newly reclaimed?" The beggar monk chuckled and looked directly into the second lieutenant's eyes: "What about the original owner?"

The old man's eyes were dark and deep, and he didn't know how many secrets were buried.

"How do I know?" Regarding the history of Plato, Winters didn't know much about it: "It's an ownerless land."

The old monk burst into laughter, laughing so hard that he seemed to have heard the most ridiculous joke.

"Little guy, let me tell you, from the ocean in the east to the vast sea in the west, there is no ownerless land under the sky. There is no one's land. But there is not even an inch of ownerless land." Brother Rhett used the palm of his hand. Wiping tears from laughter: "The newly cultivated land of the plateau people, thirty years back, was the pasture of the Hud people. The Blackwater River that divides Langtun and the neighboring town is what the Hud people call 'Daqiao'. It means nine crooked rivers.”

Winters returned to a sitting position from lying down: "So... what does this have to do with the current Wolf Town?"

"It is related, of course it is related. Everything today can be explained from the past. Only by knowing the history of this place can you understand the 'politics' of this place." Brother Rhett asked an irrelevant question: "Have you been to Langtun? A village under your jurisdiction, right?"

"I've been to every village."

"Then have you paid attention to their land?"

Winters didn't understand what the other party wanted to ask: "Land? What do you mean?"

"I ask you if you have paid attention to the amount of arable land in each village." The beggar monk smiled: "In other words, it is the amount of wealth."

"Nanxin Village and Beixin Village look worse." Winters recalled what he saw in each village and replied: "Hedong Village and Hexi Village are better, and Dusa Village is the richest."

"Wrong!" The old man took out a cane stick from nowhere and hit Winters on the head: "The richest place is where we are sitting, the Mitchell family and the Wilkes family. Home, it’s the Benting family...it’s these manor owners! Next is the village of Dussa. Then there are Hedong and Hexi. The poorest ones are the Protestant villages."

The moment he was hit by the cane, Winters seemed to have returned to the military academy classroom. He covered his head and asked, "So? Isn't it normal to be rich and poor?"

Brother Rhett asked calmly: "Didn't you find anything wrong?"

"What's wrong?"

"Pa" the old monk gave Winters another blow with the cane on the head: "Think carefully, what is planted in the land of the manor? What is planted in the land of Dussa Village? What is planted in the land of other villages?"

"How do I know? I can't even tell the difference between wheat seedlings and weeds!" If the other person was not an old man over ninety years old, Winters would have wanted to grab the cane stick and slap him back.

"[Selika language] If the four limbs are not diligent, the five grains will not be separated." The mendicant monk muttered a sentence in a language that Winters could not understand. He no longer tried to guide Winters to think, but directly instilled: "Big What the landlords grow at home are tobacco, sugar beets and other crops that can be sold for money, and there is only a small amount of arable land to grow food. Why? Because they are not short of food, how much can they eat with their mouths open? The manor owner occupies the best and best place in Langtun. They have the most land but the fewest people, so most of their cultivated land is used to grow cash crops.”

The old man took a breath and continued: "As for Dussa Village, the population of Dussa Village is smaller than that of other villages, but their land is second only to the manor owners, and is more than the other four villages combined, or even more You can use the three-pot system. Do you know what the three-pot system is?"

Winters, who was leaning forward with his upper body resting on his elbows, shook his head.

"The three-field system is rotation farming. The cultivated land is divided into three equal parts, one for staple crops, one for auxiliary crops, and one for fallow pasture. They are rotated every year." The old monk thought for a while and asked, "Have you seen The public pasture in Dousa Village, right?”

"I've seen it."

"The land that was left fallow this year has been used as the village's public pasture. That's why Dusak can raise horses and feed oats to pigs, because they have no shortage of arable land."

"What about the other four villages?"

The beggar monk sneered and said: "The other four villages? Those four villages go to Dusa Village to rent horse plows every year, because their cultivated land has been used to grow food and they cannot raise large animals. Hedong and Hexi The cultivated land in the two villages is barely enough.

The two Protestant villages had the largest population but the least arable land. Even if every inch of land was planted with food, it would not be enough to eat. Aren’t all the long-term employees of the Mitchell family Protestant? Which farmer would be willing to work as a hired laborer if he could be a self-cultivated farmer? "

"The more people there are, the less farmland there is?" Winters frowned: "Why is this so? Why not cultivate wasteland? I have obviously seen a lot of wasteland!"

"Do you think the wasteland here can be reclaimed if you want?" The old monk's smile became colder: "I have already told you, every inch of land, every tree, every river here... even in the forest The rabbits in the river, the fish in the river, and the birds flying in the sky all have owners!”

"who?"

The mendicant monk pointed his cane stick at the tip of Winters' nose: "Yours."

Winters was confused at first, then surprised, and finally displeased: "Do you think this is funny?"

"Or let me put it another way." The old monk put his hand on the cane stick: "You are part of the real owner of this land."

Winters finally woke up: "You mean...the Army? The Plato Army?"

"You're not too stupid." The old monk patted the second lieutenant on the shoulder with a cane stick: "Of course it's the military, otherwise why would a small household like you have the power of life and death in Langtun? Do you think you are? Are you here to manage security? No! You represent the authority of the real owner of this land."

"Wait a minute...the power of life and death?" The young Veneta man was confused: "I am not sitting in a fat position, I was sent here! Did the resident officer of Wolf Town before me Hasn’t it been vacant for more than ten years?”

"The vacancy is because Langtun is not rich, not because the position of the town official is not lucrative. In the system you are in, you are sent here as a dispatch. But to the people here, you are a master who fell from the sky.

The status of the Palatine Army in the new reclamation area is almost equal to that of a feudal lord. Here you are half a lord. Therefore, the landlords and Dusak welcome you, the villages in Hedong and Hexi fear you, and the Protestants do not trust you at all. "

"Why don't you trust me?"

The beggar monk had a half-smile on his face: "There are some Protestants, and there is wasteland in Langtun. What's stopping them from opening up wasteland?"

"Uh... it's me?" The answer was obvious, but Winters didn't understand: "Why?"

Brother Rhett sneered and said: "Because if they occupy even one more piece of land, you will take the Dussa people over and chop off their heads - don't worry, the Dussa people will be happy to do such a thing. If you are When they are defeated, another group of soldiers will come from the county. If one group is not enough, ten or a hundred groups will come in until they are all killed.

So they are afraid of you, they are scared to death of you, they are afraid that you will find the corner of the land they have stolen, they are afraid that you will find the fish bones and rabbit bones in their house. You are the knight master of Langtun, and they are despicable farmers who are poaching and cultivating on your land. How can they not be afraid of you? "

"I still don't understand." Winters still couldn't figure it out in some places: "Does Plato's law even prohibit hunting and fishing? It also prohibits private land reclamation?"

"The laws of Plato do not prohibit it, but the laws of the newly cultivated land do not allow it."

"Why?"

"No reason." The old mendicant monk had discovered that the political talent of the second lieutenant in front of him was lacking: "This land is the trophy of the Plato Army, and the Plato Army has all the rights from the sky to the earth."

"Then what?"

“Then the best land was sold to wealthy people to repay the loans, and so there were these manor owners. As a reward for fighting in the war and as compensation for generations of service, Dusac was also assigned land, and so there was the village of Dusac. There are also some poor people and tenant farmers who dream of becoming self-cultivators, and they only have enough money to buy a small piece of land. These are the people in Hedong and Hexi villages."

"What about Nanxin and Beixin villages?"

"Those Protestants were originally from the Empire, and they have fled from the north one after another in the past ten years." The old monk smiled and said: "The Empire does not like the Protestants, and the country of galloping horses lacks people to fill its borders. So the Catholic Church Every time there is strife in the north, there are more Protestants in the new land. But the Protestants here came late, and the price of land in Langtun is not as cheap as it was in the early years, not to mention there are other buyers."

"who?"

"What do you think?" The old mendicant monk's eyes were gleaming: "The Dussa people have a land grant system, so they don't have to worry about the land. Small farmers can only support their own family, and they have no money to buy land. So who can it be? So who has money?”

Winters was silent. He thought for a while and said: "Suppressing land reclamation in order to sell land for money, no matter how you think about it, it will do more harm than good. How could the Platuan people come up with such a system?"

"It does more harm than good?" Brother Rhett laughed dumbly: "Boy, you really don't understand the power of this system at all. Among your republics, the country of Galloping Horse has the smallest population, but the territory of Galloping Horse Country But it’s the most, and it’s getting more and more. What do you think it’s based on?”

"Is it possible to make money by selling land?"

"Of course it's not that simple." The old monk hit Winters on the head with a cane stick again and said, "Let me ask you, what do you think is the most murderous weapon in the world?"

"Uh." Winters replied tentatively: "Sword?"

"Wrong! The most murderous weapon in the world is called 'mobilization'. The sword is a human weapon. No matter how useful it is, it can only kill one person. Mobilization is a weapon used by countries to kill each other. It can prosper a country or destroy it." The monk sighed: "Oh, you don't understand what I said. Let me say something you can understand."

"Please tell me." Winters sat respectfully with his knees together.

"Searching for mountains requires manpower, and your dozens of Dusak alone are not enough. Dusak is your most reliable manpower, but the number is too small after all. The other four villages must be mobilized."

Winters said bitterly: "South and North New Villages are unwilling to send militiamen. The Protestants are particularly hostile to me. I don't know why."

"You hang out with the Dusak people every day. It's strange that they can look good on you. Who do you think the Dusak people under the emperor are dealing with? Who do you think is the person who drove them out of their homeland?" The old monk said with a face. Shang's smile was very subtle: "But I will help you solve the problem over there."

Winters was quite surprised: "Aren't you a Catholic? Carman thinks it would be dangerous for you to go to the Protestant side."

"Politics! Boy! Politics!" The beggar monk hit the second lieutenant on the head twice with a stick: "The point of politics is not to make the other party yours, but to make the other party think you are his. Do you understand? ? Come with me to the Protestant village tomorrow."

After saying that, the old monk leaned on the cane stick and left Winters' room without looking back.

"Please walk slowly." Winters stood up and watched.

The old man walked out for a while, and only after Winters closed the door did he react: "[Veneta swears]! When did I really think of this old bastard as a teacher?"

The word mobilization did not appear in the main universe until the French Revolution. In the book universe, let this word be born earlier.

PS: Sorry, I lost consciousness and got the number of chapters wrong again. This chapter is Chapter 12.

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