On the last day of November, in the emperor's office in the Cultural Palace, Chongzhen was receiving Yin Bi Ziyan of the Shuntian Mansion. Because of the cold weather and the lack of fire in the Mandarin Palace, a bronze gilt smoking cage was placed in the room, burning red charcoal made of fine hardwood.

In this partitioned room, the space has been reduced, so that just one smoke cage can already make the room warm like spring. A flue made of iron sheet is also installed on the top of the smoker cage, and the smell of charcoal fire, which was originally very weak, is now even more difficult to smell.

“… Your Majesty, Liu Chongqing was transferred to the post of mayor of Beijing, and the minister was very much in favor of it. However, is it inappropriate to establish the Beijing Municipal Hall with the Beijing City Hall as the mainstay, and also to include the capital parts of Wanping and Daxing counties into Beijing?

Although the Jingcheng City Hall has shared a lot of work between the two counties and the Shuncheon Prefecture since its establishment, since ancient times, the imperial court has adopted the county system to govern the people, and the people have long been accustomed to the existence of the county government. Now rashly letting the city hall replace the county-level yamen, will the people lose their sense of reverence for the imperial court?

Since the Beijing City Hall set up commercial courts in Wanping and Daxing counties, the number of commercial dispute cases has changed from less than one in three days to about 30 cases a day.

If the city hall is allowed to take over the jurisdiction of the two counties in the capital, will the people, who have lost their reverence for the yamen, also sue the usual minor disputes in court? In this case, just dealing with these trivial things will consume a lot of resources from the town hall.

The capital is at the foot of the Son of Heaven, the first good area of the Ming Dynasty, if the capital becomes so chaotic, then what will become of the rest of the Ming Dynasty? Your Majesty should rule the country with nothing to do, and not to disturb the whole world, so that the people's hearts fluctuate and it is difficult to control. ”

Zhu Youzhen listened carefully to Bi Ziyan's reasoning, and then said: "Bi Qing's words are very good, but they are not suitable for today's Daming. Resting with the people was naturally correct at the beginning of the country, after all, at that time, the Central Plains was sparsely populated after decades of war, and it was the norm to have no rooster crow for a hundred miles.

Therefore, Taizu did not want to make trouble, so he formulated a policy of recuperation and rest with the people. But more than 250 years have passed, and the uninhabited land has become a densely populated place, and even the deep mountains and valleys that used to be uninhabited have been inhabited.

Today's Ming Dynasty, if the court does not interfere in the lives of the people, the people will be safe and sound, and they can live and work in peace and contentment. The growth rate of the population of the Ming Dynasty, coupled with the degree of land annexation by the gentry in various places, determines that the people of the Ming Dynasty have no land and property, and there will be more and more homeless people who cannot find a way out.

These people, in the big cities, will become coolies and hooligans; In economically backward places, they will encroach on mountains and forests, destroy forests and cultivate land, and become local shantytowns without household registration; Or form a gang, steal mining mountains, and become a cottage that resists the government.

I think that in this situation, the more the court wants the world to be okay and is unwilling to take the initiative to manage it, the more the world will be boiling. The good people of the land will lose confidence in the court if they are not protected by the court. Those evil forces will lose their reverence for the imperial court, collude with local tyrants and inferior gentry, and want to replace the imperial court in the local government and become the local power center.

If the imperial court's decree cannot leave the capital gate, the local government will levie and extort money in the name of the imperial court, and on the other hand, refuse to pay normal taxes to the imperial court, and there will be humane and sanctimonious public incitement of the people to oppose the imperial court, saying that the imperial court is not sympathetic to the people, and that the government is harsh and fierce, what does such a person want to do? Bi Qing might as well explain it to me? ”

Bi Ziyan was silent for a moment, he was not a scholar who knew nothing about the people's livelihood, but because he was familiar with practice, he was considered by the Donglin Party to be a rare official who knew the economy.

Chongzhen said that these folk evils, he has either heard of or personally touched them. But after all, he is still a scholar, and he has learned this set of Confucian theories of statecraft since he was a child.

Since Dong Zhongshu, Zhu Xi and other scholars have continuously commented on Confucianism, the Confucian rule of etiquette and religion and the idea of ruling by inaction in Huang Laozhixue have been deeply rooted in the orthodox scholar education of the Ming Dynasty.

The local government tried not to interfere in the lives of the people, so that they could live and work in peace and contentment. Except for a very small number of criminal cases, most of the disputes that occur among the people are best digested by the local gentry and clans, and the contradictions should not be handed over to the magistrates to intervene. This is the political correctness of the Ming Dynasty.

Therefore, in the Ming Dynasty's every six years, the number of litigation cases during the official's tenure has also become one of the important contents of the assessment. Of course, some incompetent officials use this as an excuse to refuse to accept the people's lawsuits as their own political achievements, which is also a common phenomenon.

Although Bi Ziyan is stronger than these incompetent officials, and believes that the settlement of lawsuits should be based on resolving the contradictions among the people, he cannot get rid of them, and he leaves these contradictions to the local clans to deal with on their own, advocating that moral education should be the mainstay, so that the people can restore the simple customs of the past.

But in Chongzhen's view, the so-called moral education and restoration of simple customs are nothing more than a policy of fooling the people, and making people content with their duties and obeying the feudal order of the Three Principles and Five Constants.

To put it simply, everyone knows that braised pork is delicious, and Confucianism believes that if everyone knows this fact, everyone will want to eat braised pork, and no one will want to eat braised vegetables.

There are so many braised porks in total, and white rice is only enough for a small number of people to eat, and most people can only eat bran vegetables on weekdays. If everyone wants to eat braised pork and white rice, but doesn't want to eat bran vegetables, wouldn't they have to fight every day? Even if someone is lucky enough to eat braised pork and white rice for a while, no one is sure whether they will eat it at the next meal.

Therefore, the scholars who eat braised pork think that as long as most people do not know what braised pork tastes like, and even think that there is no difference between braised pork and white rice and bran and vegetable wotou, then there will not be so many disputes in the world.

In order to maintain their right to eat braised pork and white rice for a long time, they created political power, clan power, divine power, and husband power, and brought shackles from the bottom to the bottom of the people from top to bottom.

As long as the people maintain their reverence for feudal etiquette and religion, and are ignorant of the outside world and society, they will inevitably rely on and respect the local landlords, gentry and scholars, which constitutes the ruling order of the Ming Dynasty and the way of long-term peace and stability of every feudal dynasty for thousands of years.

Bi Ziyan, as a leader among the doctors of the Ming Dynasty, can see the current problems of the Ming Dynasty, but he cannot find a solution to the problem, so he can only find a way to solve the problem from the classics of Chinese history. He believes that the reason why today's Ming Dynasty is full of contradictions, in the final analysis, lies in the rule of officials. The moral decay of the local gentry led to the rise of traitors and the decline of the world.

If you want to save the luck of the Ming Dynasty, it is still to reorganize people's hearts, set up a moral benchmark, and hope to restore the political clarity of the early days of the country. However, he also did not agree with the comprehensive suppression of active private commerce and the return to a purely agricultural society that was admired by some Taoist gentlemen, "the voice of chickens and dogs is heard, and the old and the dead do not get along".

After all, he has served as a pro-people official for so long, and he knows more than these Taoist gentlemen who talk about it, and today's Ming Dynasty can no longer live without business. The huge disparity in economic development between the north and the south has caused the north to lose grain, cloth, and other goods from the south, and the people will fall into a situation where they have no food and clothing.

Moreover, the changes in the capital in the past year have also allowed him to re-establish his understanding of commerce, which is not only about communicating with each other, but also about bringing large amounts of tax revenue to the local government, so that the land is not endowed and the country is sufficient.

Bi Ziyan objected to Chongzhen's exaltation of the status of merchants, such as allowing them to discuss commercial law on their own, and allowing merchants to participate in the adjudication of commercial courts, which undoubtedly touched the traditional power of scholars.

On the other hand, the government interfered too much in the lives of the people, and all the power of the original gentry and scholars to maintain the stability of the grassroots of society was transferred to the imperial court, which not only greatly increased the cost of the imperial court to govern the local area, but also destroyed the original local power balance, so that the imperial court and the local gentry and scholars formed an antagonistic situation.

Bi Ziyan certainly knows that the local gentry are now morally corrupt, and many gentry, who were supposed to maintain local stability, have now become the targets of intensifying social contradictions. These gentry kept those idle, green-skinned hooligans, in the fish and meat towns, and took over the industry, even with a class of scholars and doctors.

The emperor's question was really difficult for him to answer. He knew that what the emperor said might be correct, but the Confucian education that had been instilled for a long time made it difficult for him to agree with Chongzhen's statement.

Seeing that Bi Ziyan was silent, Zhu Youzhen shook his head and said, "Since Bi Qing is still difficult to decide, then you might as well watch it first." The left and right capitals are all under the noses of me and the imperial court, even if something goes wrong, can it still be changed back..."

Bi Ziyan, who was not very determined, was finally persuaded by Chongzhen, and decided to let the city hall fully manage the capital for a period of time.

After sending Bi Ziyan away, Chongzhen asked Wang Chengen to summon Shen Hongsuo, the governor of Shandong, and Zhang Yaofang, the right chief of the king of Tonglusu. After the two officials came in, Zhu Youzhen raised his head and took a closer look. One of the officials was still in the prime of life, but the other had gray hair and Western eyes, and looked rather frail.

It looked younger than Shen Hongsuo, the governor of Shandong, and the old and frail one was Zhang Yaofang, the right chief of the king of Lusu, and after accepting the salute of the two, Zhu Youzhen said to the two of them straight to the point: "The imperial court is ready to control the seasonal floods in the Yishusi River basin that originate in Shandong.

The initial idea is to build a reservoir to store water in the upper reaches of the river, and open a channel from Luoma Lake to the mouth of the Guan River, so as to divert the flood water to the sea, protect the homes and cultivated land of the people around Luoma Lake, Yinan and Yibei, and redevelop the land that was abandoned by floods after the Yellow Sea was taken away.

Although the Yishusi River Basin involves Shandong, Henan, and Nanzhili, it is mainly based on Shandong. Therefore, I hope that Shandong can afford the main task of controlling the river, but Governor Shen recommended Zhang Changshi to me, saying that you have inspected the Yishu River and suggested to him a plan for the management, so I invited you to come to the capital to hear your thoughts on the management of this river basin..."