As soon as Xu Xinsu left, Xu Xingsheng reported to Chongzhen with a large bag of information from the Ministry of Industry of the Inner Government. After a year of development, the workshops under the name of the Inner Government and the machine production research institutes under the name of the Wensi Academy have begun to enter a period of rapid development.

Textile, sugar, mining, coal-iron complex, cement, brick, glass manufacturing, plus shipbuilding, clocks, horse-drawn carriages, textile machinery, gear cutting and other parts processing and manufacturing. These workshops under the name of the Inner Government alone have more than 150,000 industrial workers.

And these do not include the construction workers who were converted from the Beijing camp and the guards, as well as the salt workers who were converted from salt ding, and the fishery workers.

The average output value created by these workers last year was 125 yuan, that is, the above industries alone created nearly 19 million yuan of wealth. Although this figure does not seem to be worth mentioning compared with the agricultural output value of the Ming Dynasty.

But for the inner court composed of the original twenty-four eunuchs in the palace, this is already an astronomical number. In the past, these eunuchs in the palace were sent by the emperor to collect money, even if they were angry and resentful, they would not exceed 4 or 5 million taels a year. When these revenues are sent back to the palace, at most half of them are left.

And in order to collect these taxes, the inner court has also become the enemy of the gentry and the common people of the world, and the noisy and powerful tax supervisors basically did not get a good death.

Although the eunuchs in the palace are the most loyal to the emperor compared with the outer courts, they are also human beings, except for a very few existences, most people still have the emotions that ordinary people should have. You can't expect a group of people who know that there is no future to make sacrifices for the perpetuity of the Ming Dynasty.

If there is a stable meal to eat, who is willing to risk their lives to win a few years of people's glory, compared with the civil officials of the foreign courts, the probability that the chief eunuch in the palace can die well is too small.

It's just that there was no way to think about it before, if you didn't give your life to win the emperor's appreciation, even in the palace, you won't be able to eat a bite of comfort. So once they got the opportunity to go out of the palace to do business, these eunuchs showed the courage to break the cauldron and sink the boat, wanting to get enough money in an errand to lay the foundation for going out of the palace in the future.

Under the guidance of this mood of eagerness for success and profit, doing good things into bad things is the main impression of the common people on these eunuchs. With the means of these eunuchs, the local gentry had the basis to incite public opinion and oppose the central officials leaving the palace to supervise the local officials.

And now it's different, as long as these industries invested and opened by the palace are managed well, they are not only stable but also highly profitable than mining and extorting from the mansions of the rich people. Moreover, the existence of these industries also allowed the leaders and eunuchs who had no way out to see a way out.

Under Chongzhen's idea of diverting eunuchs and palace maids in the palace, except for a large part of the low-level eunuchs and palace maids, they were dismissed and placed in various industries. There were also some wealthy chiefs, stewards and eunuchs who also took this opportunity to retreat bravely, or got a branch of affairs, or relied on these industries to open their own shops.

This is also the reason why the number of people in the palace was reduced to more than 7,700 in this year, but the opposition in the palace was not great. Even some unimportant concubines left behind by Emperor Wanli and Emperor Taichang were moved to the outside of the palace with the acquiescence of Chongzhen.

Under this drastic downsizing, the expenditure of the palace this year is less than half of that of previous years, but the treatment of the remaining middle and lower-class eunuchs and palace maids has increased slightly. And this is also the fundamental reason why the reform of the inner court can be continuously implemented.

On the surface, this kind of change is just a new way to clean and replace the old pattern of the inner court composed of 24 eunuchs in the palace according to the unspoken rules of the emperor and the ministers of the dynasty. It's just that Chongzhen did not choose the smooth way of the previous succession of emperors, but adopted a comprehensive purge of distrust in the inner court.

Regarding the unnatural deaths of two successive emperors, Chongzhen has privately expressed some irresponsible speculations. Therefore, neither the inner court nor the outer court dared to blatantly obstruct Chongzhen's reform and purge of the inner court. After all, everyone is unwilling to become the object of suspicion of Chongzhen, this kind of thing can be wiped out if it is touched with a little skin, and they have obviously not yet reached the spirit of sacrificing their ego and fulfilling everyone.

The purge of the 24 prisons in the palace and the adjustment of personnel were almost over, and Zhu Youzhen began to focus on how to improve the administrative efficiency of the inner court. Except for some information and industrial control, he did not intend to make the Inner Court a restrictive institution for the civilian clique of foreign Koreans, as was the practice of the past.

From the beginning of Chengzu's establishment of the framework of the inner court, successive emperors have constantly increased the power of the inner court, trying to balance the increasingly powerful civil official groups of foreign courts. However, this concept of balance based on the struggle for power has no way to achieve the effect of balance of power in practice.

In the middle and later periods, some officials in the inner court and cabinet colluded with each other to completely control the government, which proved that this balance of power was not reliable.

In the final analysis, the power of the inner court comes entirely from the emperor himself, and the outer court also needs the support of the emperor to function well. Letting the inner court contain the outer court is undoubtedly attacking its right hand with its own left hand, which not only wastes administrative efficiency, but also causes the confrontation between the imperial power and the gentry class, thus directly weakening the ruling foundation of the imperial power.

The more fierce the struggle between the inner court and the outer court, the more the imperial power declined. In the era of the Apocalypse, Wei Zhongxian colluded with some civil officials of the outer courts, so that the inner court completely overrode the outer courts, and on the surface achieved a great victory.

But in reality, the eunuchs, who controlled the capital, completely lost the support of the local gentry class, especially the gentry bureaucrats in the Jiangnan area. The arrears and refusal to pay taxes at the local level are manifestations of the intensification of this contradiction.

In fact, even if there were no accidents in the apocalypse, Wei Zhongxian's economic method of relying on fines for the gentry and bureaucrats to maintain the financial operation of the Ming Dynasty would be difficult to maintain.

After all, according to the taxation method of the Ming Dynasty, the smallest social unit in the Ming Dynasty is not to the taxpayers, but to the large and small landlords and gentry in each county. These landlords and gentry undertook the relationship of power from the peasant households to the county government. Otherwise, with the establishment of no more than 10 court officials in each county, where can it bear the management of a county's population of thousands or tens of thousands.

Without the support of these landlords and gentry for the imperial court, the cost of local governance rose and the tax receivable fell, which was also a matter of course.

In this kind of situation where the treasury is empty and domestic and foreign difficulties are in difficulty, Zhu Youzhen does not feel that this kind of power check and balance method still has the value of survival. For the current Ming Dynasty, it is imperative to improve administrative efficiency, enhance local control, and open up new sources of national tax revenue.

Supporting the inner court to make trouble for the civilian bureaucratic system of foreign dynasties, and letting these officials develop a bureaucratic style of passing the buck to each other in case of trouble, and forming a party for personal gain, is simply digging a hole for Chongzhen himself. Therefore, he would rather tolerate a less obedient but capable clique of civilian officials. There is no need for a civil service system that is only submissive but incapable of doing things.

As for the statement that these eunuchs have no descendants, so they will uphold the public heart and be loyal to the emperor when doing things, Zhu Youzhen scoffed. Whether it is Wei Zhongxian's family, whether it is the practice of giving titles and officials, or letting various places build ancestral halls for themselves, it has proved the absurdity of this statement.

The civil official group of the Ming Dynasty has always been the political representative of the landlords and gentry in various places, but under the suppression of the imperial power, there has now been a strange phenomenon like the Donglin Party, representing commercial capital and the landlord class.

However, unlike the new aristocracy in Britain, commercial capital has never become the mainstream force of the Donglin Party, and the strong inertia of traditional Confucianism has made these commercial capitals obediently subordinate to the landlord and gentry class, although they are the biggest financiers behind the Donglin Party.

This also caused these landlords and gentry to protect commercial capital, so as to withhold the industrial and commercial taxes that should have gone into the state treasury into their own pockets. The seemingly prosperous and splendid Jiangnan commerce not only did not become a new source of wealth for the Ming treasury, but relied on the peculiar tax system of fixed tax and became a cancer on the body of the Ming Dynasty. The commercial capital of Jiangnan absorbed the wealth of the entire Ming Dynasty, but there was no measure to give back.

The wealth acquired by this commercial capital has been transformed into exquisite handicrafts, elegant gardens, and a nightlife of warm nephrite. But this wealth was not transformed into a trace of industrial capital that enhanced the national strength of the Ming Dynasty.

It can be said that the commercial capital of Jiangnan watered by the blood and sweat of the entire Ming Dynasty is not a majestic giant tree that supports the great tomorrow, but a bewitching poppy.

Of course, this combination of commercial capital and the landlords and gentry in Jiangnan will inevitably result in the harm to the interests of the people at the bottom and the commercially underdeveloped areas.

And this is why most of the northern bureaucratic gentry were willing to stand on Chongzhen's side and suppress the combination of Jiangnan commercial capital and the interests of the landlords and gentry represented by the Donglin Party, just as they had preferred to stand with Wei Zhongxian.

This is entirely because the political group represented by the Donglin Party has caused great harm to other political groups in the Ming Dynasty.

Therefore, Zhu Youzhen no longer wanted the inner court to go into battle shirtless at this time, so as to find an excuse for these Donglin party members who represented the commercial capital of Jiangnan.

He hoped that after the establishment of the Beijing-Tianjin-Tang industrial base in the north, a new force based on industrial capital could be cultivated to suppress the commercial capital in Jiangnan. Thus completely subverting the current political pattern in the court.

While Chongzhen was listening and thinking, Xu Xingsheng's report was finally coming to an end. And the content of the final report, whether it is Xu Xingsheng or Zhu Youzhen, is extremely important.

As a result, the debriefing of these contents began to become very detailed, far exceeding the previous debriefing time.

The first thing Xu Xingsheng said was steel and coal. After the opening of the Jingxi Railway, after several minor accidents, track breaks, and thefts, it has finally entered a period of smooth operation.

As a result, the 24-hour freight volume of the West Beijing Railway has increased from 78 tons to 450 tons.

Before the opening of the Jingxi Railway, the camel caravan between Mentougou and the Jingxi Coal Plant, consisting of about 14 camels, carried about 5,600 catties of coal. About each camel can carry 400 catties of goods, and it takes 2-3 days to go back and forth.

This data is already quite outstanding, the pack mules walking the mountain roads in the north and south provinces of the Ming Dynasty, even if they are very good healthy mules, the pack is not more than 300 catties, and the pack needs to be fed concentrate feed in the process of transport. If you go a long distance, half of the weight is eaten by itself.

Before the railway was opened, there were hundreds of camels outside Mentougou every day, which could transport more than 10 kilograms of goods to the capital, of which more than eighty percent were coal.

After the opening of the Jingxi Railway, the daily shipment of coal, steel, lime and other goods to the capital quickly soared to nine times the original amount. And some large pieces of cast iron, which were originally inconvenient to transport, can now be easily transported to the capital.

Xu Xingsheng's request to the emperor was to add a double line to the Jingxi Railway and increase the transportation volume of the Jingxi Railway again. Then the Beijing-West Railway will be extended to the east, bypassing the city of Beijing and directly connected to Tongzhou, where the coal, lime and cement from Mentougou can reach the port of Tianjin through the canal, and then be transported from the port of Tianjin to the south.