Qin Official

On the first day of May, Heifu once again stood in front of the simple inner gate of Blind Mountain, feeling a little complicated.

Perhaps he felt that he would definitely not be able to meet the household registration standard this year. After arriving in the village after hearing the results of the trial, the village stingy man in Jianshui Township simply ordered people to sweep away all the livestock and property that should be confiscated in Blind Mountain, and then set fire to them. Just burn this Liju!

Anyway, you have to walk a long way to reach that place. Now that the structures are gone, the houses that remain serve as a lair for the desperate bandits.

This task, of course, fell to the local pavilion chief...

Everyone in Huyang Pavilion felt a little emotional after revisiting their old place. This was the most dangerous case they had encountered since they took office. If Xiao Tao hadn't shot to death the man who incited officials to kill officials and fled in time, who knows what would have happened? Maybe he had been smashed into a pulp. Thinking about it afterwards, I still have lingering fears.

After going in and walking around, they found that Liju, which once had a somewhat inhabited atmosphere, had become deserted. Sparrows had fallen on the stove, and yellow dogs who could not find their owners were running around. There was a mess everywhere.

Seeing this situation, Ji Ying was a little confused. When passing by a house, he remembered that when he first came to deliver a letter, he went in and asked for a sip of water. This family was kind to him.

When Ji Ying saw the tragic situation of the women who were kidnapped and sold, he just wanted to kill everyone in the village. But after hearing the verdict, it was clear that the dozen people who were sentenced to death were certainly not worthy of pity, but the fact that more than a hundred people in the whole village became prisoners together was shocking just to hear it.

Not to mention that there are ten or twenty underage children who will become orphans in Yinguan...

So Ji Ying suddenly turned around and asked Hei Fu:

"Brother Heifu, is what we did this time right or wrong?"

…

"Is it worth sending two hundred people to jail just to save four people?"

Ji Ying asked this question, and several other people also looked up. It was obvious that they were also filled with doubts.

After Heifu pondered for a long time, he said: "The atrocities committed by one person against one person is a crime, and the atrocities committed by a hundred people against one person are also crimes. Judgments are made according to the law. It is impossible for the law not to punish everyone just because there are many people."

Most Confucian people believe that human nature is inherently good, just like water flowing downward, it is a natural thing. Even if someone has evil thoughts, they are forced by the situation. Only through morality and education can people take the right path.

However, the fact is that even after more than two thousand years of education, things like infanticide and abduction have never stopped in remote places.

In order to solve problems that cannot be solved by moral education, Legalists took the opposite path, believing that human nature is inherently evil and that everything is caused by "loving good and evil". This kind of relationship exists between king and minister, father and son, and husband and wife.

For example, Han Feizi said sadly, "Parents treat their children as follows: when a boy is born, they congratulate each other, but when a girl is born, they kill them." This is a common phenomenon in this era. This is how there are more boys than girls in Blind Mountain.

When parents give birth to children, they congratulate each other if they give birth to a boy, but if they give birth to a girl, they brutally kill her. Why? Because of profit, boys can carry on the family line and work in the fields, but girls have to pay a dowry when they grow up. The family does not have much food, and it is not worthwhile to raise a daughter-in-law for someone else.

In the eyes of Legalists, even biological parents and children care about interests like this, let alone ordinary people? Therefore, likes, dislikes and interests are deeply embedded in human nature and can never be changed through acquired efforts!

So the Legalists simply gritted their teeth and said that we should not talk about good and evil at all, but only look at right and wrong!

In a country, those who keep their own laws are good people, but those who harm others are evil people.

It is wrong for one person to do evil to one person, and it is also wrong for hundreds of people to do evil to one person. No matter how many such villains and mobs there are, they will all be punished.

After sending a large number of "villains" to prison, the Legalists proudly said that punishment breeds strength, strength breeds strength, force breeds power, Wei breeds virtue, and virtue breeds from punishment. As long as harsh punishments prevent people from breaking the law, the world will be prosperous. It can be cured.

But they looked at society and human nature too simply. Those who had not committed any crime but were suffering from it, from then on regarded the law as a bad law, Qin as a violent Qin, and when one man made trouble, the world responded.

Pure moral education is naturally undesirable. Are simple legalist punishments enough?

Heifu fell into thought.

The original intention and general direction of the case they handled this time was right. It is naturally a good thing that the women who were robbed and trafficked can go home. The perpetrators who abused them received the punishment they deserved, which was enough to satisfy people.

However, all the people in Blind Mountain, regardless of gender, were punished as concubines according to the crime of continuous imprisonment. Even Heifu was a little uneasy because he knew the fate of those people.

In the past month, whenever he went to the county seat to participate in a trial, he would go to the slave market in Anlu County to take a look.

Those two-legged goods filled the cattle and horse stalls, and the air was filled with odors, sweat and blood, mixed with the stench from the dung ditches of Lichen's concubines. Looking at the concubines who were imprisoned in cages, wearing wooden shackles, or tied together with straw ropes, all of them had withered and unkempt hair and had long lost their expectations for life. Only a few of them had bright eyes. Xiao Lichen stretched out his dirty hands to him, as if begging for rescue.

It is surprising to say that while the laws of Qin were cracking down on abduction and trafficking and strictly prohibited soldiers from selling their wives and children, they also allowed the slave trade. In addition to the captives and barbarians who flowed in from foreign countries, there were many Qin people who were tortured and demoted as concubines every year. Their situation is worse than those of the women who were kidnapped and sold. I have to say how big the difference is between the two? Not really.

If you think about it carefully, this contradiction is actually not a contradiction. The Qin government is a big government with strong control. Everything beyond the control of the government is prohibited: business is strictly suppressed, and free movement between household registrations is not allowed. In this way Only then can people have to seek to change their own class through farming and fighting, so as to achieve the goal of strengthening the army and enriching the country.

In this way, the number of people who were punished as concubines due to crimes and the length of their sentences were all under the control of the government. Moreover, these people could also serve as the bottom of the pyramid of military merit and continuously create labor value for the country.

But private robbery is different. On the one hand, the people who have lost their children will feel uneasy, creating chaos and fear. On the other hand, this kind of population flow outside official control cannot bring any benefits to the government, so it is regarded as a cancer and must be eliminated!

After figuring this out, Heifu became even more confused.

"At first I thought of myself as a 'Heavenly Dog' who hates evil and feels that everything I do is right. But now it seems that I, the chief of the pavilion, am just a dog of the Qin government, just a tool to maintain Qin's rule. Just a tool?"

"Qin Code" is advanced, but there are also big problems. Maybe this is the root cause of Qin's demise?

It's just that with Heifu's current status, there is nothing he can do about those problems. He knows that this is the limitation of the times. As long as productivity does not break through the critical point, similar things will happen one after another.

Qin's laws can save the troubled times when rituals and music have collapsed, but this kind of wartime laws and regulations cannot be comprehensive and achieve great governance in the world by purely using magic.

But something is better than nothing.

In this era of competition, where the "Qin Code" can still be enforced, although the slave trade has never stopped, the abduction and trafficking of civilian children has been restrained. But in the Six Nations, even this cannot be guaranteed.

What Heifu didn't know was that when he was fighting against the abduction and trafficking incident in Blind Mountain, a poor young man named "Luan Bu" from the Wei State who was slightly younger than him was accidentally trapped by a group of traffickers while working as a servant in a restaurant in Qidi. He took the sack and sold him as a slave to the Yan Kingdom thousands of miles away. At this moment, Luan Bu was struggling to survive in Jidu, which was besieged by the Qin army...

In another twenty years, when the Qin Dynasty was in chaos and the Qin Law became a piece of paper, that was the beginning of the nightmare. Dou Guangguo, the younger brother of Empress Dowager Dou, the mother of Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty, and his great uncle, was also abducted and trafficked more than a dozen times. In the end, Dou Guangguo was sold to a black charcoal kiln as a charcoal burner. During this period, he also encountered an accident. Hundreds of workers died. He was the only one who survived by chance and almost acted in an ancient version of "The Blind Shaft"...

The royal relatives cannot protect themselves, let alone the common people? By that time, not only had human trafficking become more rampant, but the phenomenon of civilians selling their children into slavery also intensified. It extended to around BC and became the most troublesome slave issue in the Han Dynasty.

Reality is so cruel, no matter how strict it is, okay?

Heifu doesn't know these things. He only knows the general trend of the future but doesn't know the details.

But for now, he already has his own plans.

Even if you have thoughts in your heart, you can't be kind-hearted. You can only do what you think is right within the scope of your authority, and slowly climb up until the day you have the ability to change.

The premise is that he will not forget his state of mind at this moment during the climb.

"Don't ask for everything that everyone wants, but ask for a clear conscience."

After answering Ji Ying, Heifu threw the torch into the blind mountain.

Small flames danced on the thatched roof, like swift squirrels. They devoured the hay, and slowly grew in size, becoming fire foxes with wagging tails. They slid over the pillars, jumped up to the beams, and surrounded the entire house.

Everyone lit fires everywhere, and gradually, the entire house in Blind Mountain was burned, and there were crackling sounds everywhere, which was the explosion of firewood. The flames swirled and twisted, finally blending into one. In the deepening dusk, like a roaring giant beast, it spit out long tongues of fire, burning up everything that had happened in this remote place, licking up the shocking ugliness of sin.

The smoke became thicker and thicker, and everyone in the Huyang Pavilion coughed and retreated. Only Hei Fu stood in front of this fiery purgatory. The wind caused by the flames blew his naked hair, but he himself remained unmoved.

"I only hope that the tragedy in Blind Mountain can serve as a warning to the entire Anlu County, Nan County, and even the whole country... Killing one will serve as a warning to hundreds, and punishing a hundred will serve as a warning to thousands or ten thousand people. If this can be done, it will be worth it. !”

Heifu prayed with fire in his eyes.

This is not just longing.

This is what Heifu has made up his mind to do in the future.

“I only hope that one day, there will never be blind mountains in this world again!”