The Ming Dynasty did not revolutionize

Chapter 265 Personalized Governance Plan
When Zhu Jianxuan listened to Peng Yuanrui's introduction, he was speechless at first about the small merchants of the Ming Dynasty.

These small merchants who came from the Ming Dynasty on their own have probably cheated many low-level farmers and small craftsmen from the Free State in the past two years.

The local tradition of Shenzhou is to emphasize agriculture and suppress commerce.

Even after the Chongzhen period, the status of merchants began to improve, but they still did not reach the point of controlling the imperial court.

There are many traditional customs in Shenzhou that restrict merchants, especially traditional cultural customs, which still have relatively strong restrictions on the actions of merchants.

For example, in official public occasions, the vast majority of intellectuals still regard money as worthless.

Most of the traditional gentry, landlords, and bureaucrats were not proud of doing business.

Merchants were gradually breaking through these restrictions, and their representatives were also expanding their influence among the people and the court.

They were very lucky to meet Zhu Jianxuan.

The industrial revolution and numerous pioneering actions directly triggered by Zhu Jianxuan led to a rapid expansion in the scale and power of the Ming Dynasty's industrial and commercial groups.

Under normal circumstances, we will wait until the next change in the political situation, such as when the crown prince succeeds to the throne normally.

Officials representing the interests of businessmen will surely seize the opportunity to expand their influence again.

But they were also very unlucky to meet Zhu Jianxuan.

The old emperor brought the crown prince Zhu Jianxuan to power through a coup, and Zhu Jianxuan initiated the state capitalist transformation by actively triggering an economic crisis.

The idea of ​​using monopoly capital from previous economic crises to reap new capital.

In the process of capitalist transformation in this country, most of the rapidly expanding group of top businessmen were merged and eliminated in one fell swoop.

Zhu Jianxuan harvested the most vigorous leeks he grew.

The most core and senior spokesperson of the Ming Dynasty merchants also fell on the road of continuing to expand the influence of the court.

With Zhu Jianxuan leading the military garrisons, the royal factories, and the suppression of professional bureaucrats, it was basically impossible for private monopoly capital to develop in the Ming Dynasty.

There can only be one monopoly capital in the Ming Dynasty, and that is the Ming royal family and the court.

But the free states of North America had no such restrictions.

Since the free states were truly free, especially those in the middle and north, the ruling class themselves were businessmen.

The laws they made were designed to favor businessmen.

Merchants from the Ming Dynasty operated in the Free State and were truly free from most traditional restrictions, including moral ones.

It can be considered a wild horse that has completely broken free from its reins, a ferocious beast that has escaped from the moral cage of Shenzhou.

Coupled with their Ming Dynasty identity, it must have been very difficult for the police and judges at the lower levels of the Free State.

According to Peng Yuanrui's account, county judges in the North American Free State tried some Ming Dynasty peddlers who were committing fraud and evil.

These businessmen all pleaded not guilty, regardless of whether there was evidence or witnesses.

He also debated with plaintiffs and judges very confidently, and most of the time he left the judges and plaintiffs helpless.

Most of what they do is legal in name only; they are just exploiting loopholes in the law.

It is difficult for county judges to convict them, and even if they are convicted, they will not admit it.

Some directly caused chaos in the local area, while some judges simply allowed the parties to appeal to the Free State.

Most of the judges at the Free State level are already nobles of the American Kingdom, and it is difficult for them to deal with these crimes committed by the Ming Dynasty.

Many of them had to be reported to the central court and handled by the ministers of the kingdom, so Peng Yuanrui was very familiar with them.

Zhu Jianxuan could also hear that Peng Yuanrui quite disliked these businessmen.

However, if these Ming merchants continue to make trouble, they may be regarded as people like the Venetian merchants.

The key is that it will damage the glorious image of the Ming people among the North American people.

If this is the case, it seems natural to prohibit Ming merchants from operating in the Free State.

However, if European merchants are not banned at the same time, simply not allowing Ming people to do business in the Free State is equivalent to actively restricting the citizenship rights of Ming people.

The Ming people were turned into second-class citizens within the Free State.

This made it impossible for them to compete with European merchants.

When Zhu Jianxuan thought of this, he turned around and looked at Hancock, the representative and leader of European merchants in North America:

"Since this involves a conflict between Ming immigrants and European immigrants, how does Mr. Hancock, who was once the Speaker of the Continental Congress, think it should be handled?"

Although Hancock has not seen Zhu Jianxuan for seven years, he still has a very deep impression of him.

When Zhu Jianxuan looked over, Hancock felt that Zhu Jianxuan had seen through his thoughts, and he once again remembered the evaluation he had given to Zhu Jianxuan as the business emperor.

Hancock certainly hopes to exclude Ming merchants from his business area.

But such matters can only be decided by the king himself, rather than making requests and suggestions on his own, which is likely to have a counterproductive effect.

The reason why the affairs of Ming merchants became such a big deal was not necessarily due to the instigation of European merchants such as Hancock.

Hancock felt that it was impossible for Zhu Jianxuan not to see it.

So although Zhu Jianxuan's question seemed to be asking for advice, in fact it should be a warning to himself not to cause trouble.

Hancock rolled his eyes around and glanced at the people around him. He realized that everyone was paying attention to his attitude and knew that he had no choice but to answer:

"Your Majesty, I believe that anyone in the Free State should be dealt with according to existing laws.

“If direct evidence of guilt is found, then the punishment will naturally be based on the actual crime committed.

"But if there is no direct evidence of fraud, then the only option is to sentence the defendant not guilty.

“We can only blame the imperfect laws of the Free State and the inadequate quality of the judges.

“Anything that is not explicitly prohibited by law should be allowed to be run by the people themselves.

“For things that we realize after the fact should be restricted, we should add special restrictions.

“But the law does not apply retroactively, it can only be used to deal with subsequent matters, not to trace back to previous matters.

“According to such policies will help further improve our laws.”

When Zhu Jianxuan heard the first two sentences, he instinctively nodded slightly.

Treating everyone equally and handling matters in accordance with the law is indeed the method that best conforms to people's basic and simple cognition.

Then I instinctively waved my hands when I heard what happened next.

Advocating that businessmen can exploit loopholes to help improve the law is a typical liberal trend.

Because Hancock is a representative of big businessmen, he would instinctively support and even advocate the spread of such ideas.

They seem to be standing on the side of these Ming Dynasty merchants, but in fact they are just using the support of these grassroots merchants to expand their actual political power.

In Zhu Jianxuan's view, although North America is a de facto overseas vassal state, local affairs can be governed by local autonomy.

However, administrative and legal concepts cannot go against the local customs of the Ming Dynasty.

After completing the state capitalist reform, Zhu Jianxuan will not allow private commercial ideas to brew and spread in the future.

Similarly, we cannot allow similar ideas to continue to grow wildly in North America.

When Zhu Jianxuan himself took over as King of the United States, it was because the Ming Dynasty did not have enough immigrants in North America and had no way to directly control the North American continent.

Therefore, they had to give the original European immigrants enough privileges to make them willing to welcome him to be their king.

Now the situation has begun to change. There are more than three million Ming immigrants in North America, and most of them are centrally managed in the form of military settlements.

The military garrisons were actually mobilization organizations that could theoretically recruit more than 500,000 garrison militiamen.

This should be roughly equivalent to the maximum number of European militia.

Therefore, he no longer needs to accommodate European immigrants, and he can use Ming immigrants to interfere with them.

Of course, he would not go back on his word and would not directly and forcibly abolish the free state.

Instead, we need to control the direction of their future development, like controlling a horse with a bridle, controlling their thoughts, laws, and policies:

“The idea of ​​treating everyone equally is correct.

“But the extreme principle that anything is allowed unless prohibited by law, and the extreme principle that laws should not have retroactive effect, are undesirable.

“That is to condone businessmen to exploit loopholes in the law.

“So, whether the person being tried is of Ming descent or European descent, if what they did in the Free State did not violate existing laws.

“However, if it is indeed contrary to social order and morality, violates the generally accepted moral standards of the Ming Dynasty or European immigrant groups, and harms the interests of other people.

“The American court should send special judges and supervisors to form a jury with officials from the free state where the incident occurred.

"Discuss appropriate punishment methods and form precedents to warn future generations.

“Although a light punishment can be given in this case, a heavy punishment is not appropriate if no major losses are caused.

“But we can’t just let it go because there’s no written law.”

Zhu Jianxuan felt that it was not possible to restrict the power of Ming immigrants alone and turn them into second-class citizens within the free state.

But we cannot continue to let them do whatever they want and continue to damage the image of the Ming people. Then we can only extend the moral constraints of the Ming Dynasty and the management tentacles of the American court directly to the places where they are active.

Let them and the Free State merchants no longer act recklessly.

Zhu Jianxuan's request is to allow judges to make flexible judgments based on the circumstances and to make judgments based on uncertain social morals.

This seems to violate the basic legal principle of governance by law.

But this practice is completely normal in this era and is in line with the basic understanding of the Chinese and European immigrant groups.

In this era, if there is no written law, we can still look for customary laws corresponding to the people and places. If there is nothing, we can still judge the case based on morality and public opinion.

In Shenzhou, there are clans and officials to make judgments, while European immigrants have jury meetings. Neither world is completely governed by the law.

The principle of governing completely according to law and allowing anything to be done unless prohibited by law is the result of the implementation and continued development of the Enlightenment thought.

The business community, led by Hancock, is now preparing to turn it into principle.

Zhu Jianxuan's immediate purpose was to create a channel for the American court to participate in the routine affairs of the free state.

Extending the tentacles of the royal court into the nominally completely free free state actually weakens the level of autonomy of the free state.

Liu Quanzhi and several other Ming-American court officials soon noticed this.

Some Free State aristocrats, such as Hancock and Adams, also realized this.

So Hancock asked cautiously:
"Your Majesty, if this arrangement is made, does it violate the agreement on the complete autonomy of the Free State?"

Zhu Jianxuan smiled and waved his hand and said:

“Our agreement between the Royal Court and the Free State is that the Free State will tacitly agree to complete autonomy and will neither pay taxes nor accept help from the Royal Court.

“If any help is really needed from the court, a separate treaty will be drafted to implement it as law.

"The current situation is that the Free State does not know how to deal with the conflict between Ming and European immigrants.

“So the Free State wants the Royal Court to come forward and negotiate with the Free State officials on how to deal with this, right?

"And we are discussing a new treaty.

“This process and handling of the distribution is within the scope of the Free State Agreement that was originally drafted.

“We originally formulated this Free State Agreement because we didn’t know which matters required the intervention of the Kingdom’s court and which did not.

“So at that time, it was assumed that the royal court did not need to intervene in any matter.

“It is agreed that in future actual management, matters that are discovered to be truly necessary will be listed separately and formed into legal documents for clear implementation.

“We are going through the process now.

"The Royal Court will still only be involved in the Free State's affairs when necessary."

The officials and nobles of the kingdom's court thought about it for a while and found that this was indeed the actual situation and that this logic was indeed correct.

Some nobles felt that there seemed to be something wrong here.

But at the same time, everyone had already prepared themselves mentally, and felt that the free state agreement of complete freedom was inherently unreasonable.

All subsequent patches simply rationalize it step by step.

In addition, there are more and more immigrants in the Ming Dynasty now, and the key is to manage them directly with a system of military settlements and garrisons.

This greatly increased the power of Zhu Jianxuan, the King of America.

The noble representatives of the Free State no longer had the courage to bargain directly with the king.

The key point is that everyone believes that for this logically reasonable request, they should break off relations with the king and the Ming Dynasty he represents.

So the nobles of the Free State finally accepted Zhu Jianxuan's arrangement.

Zhu Jianxuan ordered Liu Quanzhi to continue discussions with the representatives of the Free State after the meeting to draft a formal agreement document to implement the arrangements just made.

After discussing so many things, Zhu Jianxuan felt that he had been busy enough today and announced the temporary end of the meeting.

If officials and nobles have other matters, they can report to him separately.

All the officials and nobles stood up and agreed.

Zhu Jianxuan left Chengyun Hall and returned to the bedroom to rest for a while. After lunch, he began to look through the archival data of the United States in recent years.

Learn details that cannot be easily presented in an oral presentation at a meeting.

In the next few days, Zhu Jianxuan went to Chengyun Hall every morning to listen to reports from major officials and nobles and solve problems on the spot that required his own decisions.

Ten days later, on the morning court of May 15, the 45th year of Xianning.

Peng Yuanrui and Zhu Jianxuan's artisan disciples who stayed in New York to teach handed in a newly compiled report.

Preliminary calculations on cutting off, rerouting or diverting the St. Lawrence River, building a large canal through the Hudson River Valley, and connecting the Great Lakes and New York.

The overall judgment is feasible, and four specific reference plans are proposed.

The first option is also the one with the smallest amount of engineering work.

Between Montreal and Quebec, at the narrowest point of the St. Lawrence River, a dam with a length of two kilometers from north to south and a height of more than fifty meters was built.

When the water level in the Montreal River Valley rises above 45 meters, the river water can flow to New York through the north-south Hudson River Valley.

The dam-canal proposal would flood approximately 6,000 square kilometers of river valley land around Montreal.

Montreal Island itself is located at a higher altitude, so a part of it can always be left behind.

But there is a problem, not too big or too small: Montreal and the valley land on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River now belong to the British royal family of Hanover.

Although most of the flooded land is located on the southeast bank of the St. Lawrence River, it is provincial land belonging to the United States of America.

But Montreal, the Hanoverian monarchy’s most important North American stronghold, would itself be flooded.

If this dam is to be built, consultation with the British royal family is required.

The British should be able to accept it, but it is ultimately a small inconvenience and the British may need to be compensated elsewhere.

If we completely ignore Britain's attitude, we can simply and crudely blast the mountain to block the river, forming an artificial barrier lake, and the St. Lawrence River will automatically change its course to New York.

In that case, the workload and difficulty will be very small, and it may only take a few months to complete.

The second plan is adjusted based on the first plan.

Starting from an island in the river upstream of Montreal, a river embankment about 80 kilometers long and 20 meters high was built.

The St. Lawrence River is divided into two parts, with the southern half flowing along the river bank into the Hudson River Valley.

This would minimize the amount of land flooded and would not affect the British land in North America at all, so the British could be barely ignored.

Although the British would probably still complain about the United States taking the water from the St. Lawrence River.

The third option is the shortest waterway for New York to enter the Great Lakes.

A dam will be built at the outlet of Qinglong Lake-Lake Ontario, with a length of about 20 kilometers and a height of between 10 and 50 meters.

If the water level of Lake Ontario is raised to 130 meters, it can flow eastward along the Hudson River tributary valley and eventually merge into the main stream of the Hudson River Valley.

This plan would flood a small amount of land around Lake Ontario and would require a relatively large amount of engineering work.

The benefit is that it can reduce the water level difference between Qinglong Lake-Lake Ontario and Zhuque Lake-Lake Erie from 99 meters directly to 44 meters, making it more convenient to build the canal.

The fourth plan is a simple, crude, and exaggerated plan to make up the numbers.

A super dam about 20 kilometers long and over 190 meters high was built at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.

The water will flood the entire St. Lawrence River Valley and at the same time completely level the surface elevations of all the Great Lakes, all reaching more than 183 meters.

In this way, the waters of the five Great Lakes will be completely connected naturally, the water levels on both sides of Niagara Falls will be completely level, and the waterfalls themselves will naturally disappear completely.

The five Great Lakes are equivalent to five huge basins, but none of them are full of water, and a slight increase in the water level will not overflow directly.

This option would only flood the St. Lawrence River Valley and a small amount of land around Lake Ontario.

The total water level will exceed 200 meters before flooding the land on a large scale.

This project is the largest in scale, but it only requires this one dam and there is no need to consider other canal projects.

It is even possible to allow the water from White Tiger Lake - Lake Michigan to automatically flow southward, overflow from the Chicago area, and flow directly southward into the upper reaches of the Mississippi River, a great river in North America.

However, the dam, which is nearly two hundred meters high and at least twenty kilometers long, makes this plan a mere make-up plan.

(The three dams and canal schemes. The red lines and letters are the dam scheme numbers and locations. The blue lines are the canal water flow direction and location and the corresponding dam numbers.)
Either option would not require the construction of a canal connecting New York and Lake Ontario.

After the corresponding dam is built, the river water will flow over automatically.

Historically, Americans did not think of building a canal in this way, because this canal plan would only benefit the United States, and no plan would benefit Canada.

The United States had very bad relations with Canada for a long time after its founding, and the lower reaches of the St. Lawrence River completely belonged to Canada.

During the Anglo-American War of 1812, Canadian militia invaded the United States and set fire to the U.S. presidential palace.

After the war, in order to cover up the traces of fire, Americans repainted the presidential palace white, which later became the White House.

(End of this chapter)