Gwen had expected Heti's question, and he knew that Heti was well aware of the answer. She had asked the question on behalf of the others present.
"Every one of us knows the strength of Cecil." Gwen looked around at everyone in the conference room, from Norris, the head of agriculture, to Hanmer, who was in charge of steel smelting, to the senior clerks and other department heads in the Government Office. These familiar faces were all Cecil's growth and influence. "Then, every one of us should also know that Cecil's strength is based on the 'magical industrialization' and an advanced social system. It is based on an order that is different from the traditional aristocratic territories.
"Hosman and the seventy thousand men he had gathered have already collapsed. Apart from the ones who have pledged allegiance to Cecil, there are only three types of nobles left in the Southern Territory. One type has already died in the cannon fire at Shatterstone Ridge and White Water River. Another type is currently being held captive in Hosman's area and White Water River. The last type is currently on the way to exile. It's only a matter of time before they are destroyed. So, after these aristocrats and their armies disappear, the entire Southern Territory will be left with more than 40 undefended and unruled empty cities. Cecil will take over these lands and rebuild the order in the land — in Cecil's way. "
Gwen wanted to establish a new order. Now he was on the key road to unifying the entire Southern Territory. He must spread Cecil's success to the entire Southern Territory and make the Southern Territory into a strong, stable, and integrated Principality of Cecil. He must not let the more than 40 enfeoffed territories continue to operate as before. Otherwise, even if the people in those lands were loyal to him, he would only change the aristocratic team in the Southern Territory. Nothing would change.
In any case, the foundation of the traditional aristocratic system in the Southern Territory — land and population — must be changed from the root. This war was the opportunity to change everything.
Gwen had considered two plans.
The first plan was to move the entire population of the Southern Territory to Cecil and eventually form a large-scale densely populated area along the Whitewater River and the Gloom Mountain Range. He would then build a powerful industrial empire on this basis. This would maximize the power of the population in the industrial society and allow Cecil's magical industry to develop to the next stage in the shortest time possible. But after roughly estimating the population of the entire Southern Territory and investigating the distribution of various resources in the Southern Territory and the geographical location of the cities, he gave up on this simple and crude plan.
Because the entire Southern Territory had a population of millions (rough estimate, it should be more than that), this number was beyond his expectations. This was due to the existence of supernatural powers that allowed the food production of this world to be relatively abundant. Moreover, the physical fitness of the common people was relatively high, which led to a situation where the population remained high despite the hardships of life. Even in the most desolate and backward Southern Territory of Ansu, the number of people was enough to cause Gwen's simple and crude plan to be aborted.
Even though Cecil had a relatively advanced social system and a rapidly developing magic engineering industry, it was impossible to complete the migration, settlement, and transformation of a million people in a short period of time. Even if this plan was extended to three to five years, the enormous amount of resources and social pressure from the migration of such a large number of people would wear down Cecil.
Not to mention that this plan was equivalent to giving up more than eighty percent of the land in the Southern Territory in a short time. When the population was concentrated in the Whitewater River and the Gloom Mountain Range, what would happen to the resources and cultivated farmlands in the other areas of the Southern Territory? Without those resources and food production areas, Cecil's current level of development wasn't enough to support the self-sufficiency of an industrial structure with a population of over a million.
Therefore, Gawain could only choose the second option, which was to only relocate the population of the southern region and let them build new industrial zones on the north shore of Cecil as well as on the east and west sides. At the same time, the population of the other regions of the southern territory would be concentrated nearby. Through the establishment of a second-level government office, several new first-level cities would be built in other regions. Due to the previous experience of establishing a second-level government office in the Kant area, this plan was highly feasible.
Moreover, this way, Gwen could also ensure control over most of the Southern Territory. The resources distributed across the Southern Territory would also be fully developed and endlessly injected into the behemoth that was the magical industry.
Of course, the pressure to do so would still be great, but Gwen had every reason to do so.
"Migration of the population, building a magical industrial system similar to Cecil's, with experienced Cecil administrators presiding over the construction. Creating a new order and promoting the development of the magical industrial system is just one of the objectives. The other is to destroy the foundation of the old noble system."
Heti, who had been following Gwen around, immediately understood what her ancestor meant. "Land and population?"
"Yes." Gwen nodded. "It's not enough to just ban or kill this batch of land nobles. As long as their land and population system is still there, there will be new land nobles sooner or later. So we must break this system and ensure that the old nobles will never return."
The old nobles ensured the stability of the aristocratic system through the way of enfeoffment, and the land system that existed along with the enfeoffment firmly tied the civilians to the land. The civilians could not leave the land at will, and could not even do anything other than farming. When the Ansu was not yet stable, this enfeoffment ensured the basic order of the entire country. But after the advent of the magical industrial era, this situation of tying people to the land became a shackle.
With the current agricultural model established by Cecil's large-scale industrial production of alchemy potions and centralized and efficient farming, a considerable number of the agricultural population could be converted into industrial population.
On one hand, Gwen's migration was a necessary means to build the magical industrial system, because a sufficient population with basic freedom of labor was the prerequisite to ensure productivity. On the other hand, it was to completely destroy the soil of the old nobles in the Southern Territory.
Of course, saving management costs was also one of the reasons. After all, Cecil's administrative power was limited, and the Southern Territory was vast. Gwen wanted to establish an advanced management system similar to Cecil's in other parts of the Southern Territory. To achieve this level of management in the Southern Territory, the current situation of sparse population and chaotic settlement structure must be changed.
Reasonably centralizing the population, redistributing the land, and setting up a more scientific and standardized town and village structure were all effective solutions.
Not everyone could fully understand Gwen's complete theory, but at least the people here had witnessed the rise of Cecil and how the new order in the territory came into effect and operated. They understood the necessity of population migration and turned their attention to the specific difficulties faced by this grand plan.
Norris first raised the most realistic question. "What if the farmers don't want to leave their land?"
In this era, land was a shackle and tool used by the nobles to restrain their subjects. But sadly, most of the civilians did not understand and agree with this point. On the contrary, they agreed with the shackles. The farmers did not want to leave their land, which was almost an inevitable situation in any farming society. The liberated people did not want to accept your liberation, which was the problem Gwen had to face.
Even if the people in this world did not have the specific idea of "hard to leave one's homeland", forcing so many people to move would inevitably face great resistance. Even if Gwen's second plan was to just let those people move to the nearest city, the civilians who had almost never left the village in their lives would be very resistant.
The traditional nobles probably did not care about the resistance of the people, but Cecil's rules did not allow that. Gwen also had to consider the social stability of the migration.
"First of all, the migration will be a long-term plan. I plan to complete it in three to five years, and this time can be extended," Gwen explained. "So we can carry out the migration in batches. We can use the experience of Cecil's establishment. First of all, more than 80% of the serfs and slaves were the property of the lord and the Knight. Now that they have become ownerless, they are the easiest to migrate.
"Second, to ensure the supply of land, we can replace the land, cultivate new land, recover the old noble's land and redistribute it. We can ensure that the migrated people have enough farmland to accommodate, and also ensure that the process will not affect the general agricultural production of the entire Southern Territory.
"Lastly, pay attention to rewards and propaganda. Everyone in the Government Office and your clerks should have some experience in this. We are not forcing the civilians to leave their homes, but we are preparing a better new home for them. We are using propaganda to attract them to become citizens of the city, to receive land bestowed by the feudal lord, and to redistribute the land to the new feudal lord to attract them. This will make them think that the migration is an opportunity and not a compulsory order. This will make everything go smoothly."
When Gwen finished, Norris nodded repeatedly. As a farmer himself, he thought that Gwen's proposals were enough to deal with most of the migrated people.
In fact, even without these proposals, the migration plan could be enforced. In this era, the civilians were surprisingly tolerant of the lord's orders and all kinds of adversity. Most of the time, the lord could order the entire territory to not go into the mountains or to not go fishing in the river based on his mood. If Gwen wanted to enforce the migration, most of the civilians would just think that it was the new lord's whim, and then they would grit their teeth and accept the arrangement. After all, after the war, the Cecil family had become the absolute authority in the Southern Territory.
But … Gwen was not willing to do so.
When the Cecil Duchy was being established, every blemish that he did would have to be repaired at ten times or even a hundred times the cost after a few years. There was no way to make up for it, and he was well aware of the gains and losses in the process.
According to his experience, with the Druil Potion produced by the alchemy factory and the Agricultural Learning Society for the farmers to exchange their high-yield techniques, and with an advanced system, the food production of various regions would be greatly improved. With sufficient food production, a large number of free people could be concentrated in the factories, and an important part of the magical industrialization would be there.
Heidi then raised another question, "Ancestor, we still need a lot of people to build the second-level City Hall. Although the Government Office has been trying its best to train all kinds of administrative personnel and can barely gather enough people for all kinds of supervisors in the second-level City Hall, I'm afraid we still have a big gap in the relatively basic positions of clerks and clerks. Moreover, we still have to solve the issue of appeal... Although Cecil has defeated the allied forces of more than 40 nobles in the Southern Territory and we have enough power to take over the nobles' land, the administrative personnel sent to the nobles don't have enough local appeal. It's possible to send some soldiers to control the order, but if we want to build a second-level City Hall... the locals may not necessarily cooperate."
Then Heti organized her words and added, "And we have to consider that there are still remnants of the old lords in some areas waiting for an opportunity to destroy. Although the number may not be many, this kind of destruction has a huge impact on social order."
"There will definitely be remnants of resistance, and in this regard, the army will protect and eliminate them." Gwen nodded. "The issue of appeal does exist, so I have asked Byron and Philip to escort the nobles and Knight prisoners in the prisoner camp back first. I will have a good talk with those people. After they 'cooperate', we can more easily recruit and train intellectuals from all over the place, and the manpower gap can be reduced."
Gwen was destroying the old aristocratic system in the Southern Territory, but as he had realized before, whether they were willing to admit it or not, most of the intellectuals and upper class talents in this era were concentrated among the nobles and their vassals. To establish a new order, especially in a short time, he still had to find a way to borrow the strength of these people.
So he wanted to destroy the old aristocratic system, but he had to keep some of the nobles and their vassals who were willing to cooperate and accept the transformation, so that the resources they had could be put to use.
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