Chapter 407: Observing People’s Livelihood
The inspection of the underground city lasted for three full days. During these three days, Purficott not only visited every underground city and every underground road in Chernobog Street, and even personally stayed in an ordinary civilian house in the underground city for one night, to seriously experience the experience of ordinary people living in the underground city, so that I can make improvements.
Through this personal experience, Purficott also gained a deeper understanding of the situation in the underground city and made more adjustments in some policy details.
“For ordinary people, the living conditions in underground cities are already very good, but there are still areas that can be improved in the supply of daily necessities and the collection of various municipal service fees.” Sitting there In front of an ordinary-looking and narrow desk, Purficott was writing down his thoughts.
She is still in the underground city at this time, and she is located in an ordinary people's residence on the second floor of the underground city. Most of the people living around her are the lower class people of Chernobog.
This is already her second day living here. Through the experience of living in this ordinary house, Purficott has indeed gained a lot.
Not to mention anything else, just heating alone made Purficott personally feel the gap between the policies he formulated and the lives of ordinary people.
She also promoted briquettes in Chernobog. This economical and easy-to-use fuel is indeed a blessing to ordinary people. It is not complicated to make and the cost is very low. It is indeed a kind of fuel. Good stuff for Huimin.
In a private house like this, you only need to light a stove and put a few pieces of briquettes in it to ensure that the room is warm all night.
This was specially designed by Purficott considering the heating problem of the people. However, on the first night of living here, Perficott noticed that not everyone was willing to light the stove. .
It sounds difficult to understand. It is obviously very cold and there are conditions for lighting a stove. Why not turn on the stove to keep warm?
The answer is simple, reluctant to let go.
Perficott has carefully learned that the average monthly income of each family living in this area is about 2-5 gold pounds, and this is already a good life.
Generally speaking, the weekly income of men living here is about 20 shillings, which is about 1 gold pound, while women only have half of this income.
That is, if both husband and wife work, they can earn an average of about 2 gold pounds a week and 5-8 gold pounds a month. This is already a relatively good situation.
After all, the middle-class income in Langton is only 100-200 gold pounds a year, and the slightly wealthier families only have 300-500 gold pounds.
If the woman in the family does not have a job, the income will be reduced a lot. If the man does not have a job, then the family may have a very difficult life.
Although the children of many families will go out to work as child labor to supplement their family income, after Purficott promulgated the Child Labor Act, the North is very strict in this regard. This is also from a certain aspect This reduces the income of these families.
Under such circumstances, even if the price of a piece of briquettes is one penny a piece, one shilling can buy 5 pieces, which is enough for a family to use for a day, for these ordinary people, it is still a small sum of money. Fee's expenses.
After all, they may only earn 3-5 shillings a day. Spending one-third of their entire income on purchasing honeycombs is undoubtedly a heavy burden for a family.
Under such circumstances, they naturally want to save as much as possible.
There is no way to start a fire to cook. In such a cold weather, everyone hopes to have a steaming meal and a bowl of hot soup to warm the stomach and body.
So this part of making a fire for cooking cannot be omitted, so what can be omitted? Naturally, it is for heating at night.
The temperature in the underground city is basically above zero. Although it is a little cold, it is not unbearable. Therefore, the approach adopted by most ordinary people is to cover themselves with thicker quilts and wear all their clothes when sleeping at night, so that they do not need to light the stove when sleeping.
Using this method, you can save almost half of the briquettes in a day, which greatly reduces the burden of expenditure.
This fact made Purficott a little hurt, but at the same time it also made her fully aware that she often did not eat minced meat.
Before she traveled through time, she came from an era where material was very abundant. Even the most ordinary daily expenses for food and clothing were unmatched by the imperial nobles in this era.
After all, even the imperial nobles of this era cannot have fruits and vegetables all year round. They can eat all kinds of seafood and delicacies, as well as all kinds of fresh seasonal vegetables to change their tastes. As for meat, they will even get tired of it.
To put it too much, even eating out-of-season fruits and vegetables such as watermelon in winter was within the reach of ordinary people in the era before Purficott traveled through time.
In this era, sorry, even the great nobles do not have such luxury.
There are off-season vegetables and fruits in the greenhouse, but even the nobles can only eat them occasionally, and even the royal family cannot eat them every day.
So this also caused Purficott to have insufficient understanding of the lives of ordinary people. After all, although she was not a big noble after time traveling, as a noble with a territory and a manor, at least she had enough food and clothing. Still no problem.
In addition, she will earn money later, and the old housekeeper will not be able to treat her young lady harshly. Although Purficott can not eat whatever he wants, he does not feel that there is any shortage in his life.
This also resulted in Purficott's lack of understanding of the living conditions of ordinary people.
She had thought the lives of these people were miserable enough, but the results turned out to be much worse than she had imagined.
She feels that one penny a piece of briquettes is cheap enough, but there are still many people who cannot afford it.
She thinks it is very common to burn briquettes at night to survive the winter, but it is still a luxury behavior for ordinary people, and only wealthy enough families can do this.
“The government should consider raising the income level of the people at the bottom and improving their quality of life. If you store snacks, you will know etiquette, and if you have enough food and clothing, you will know honor and disgrace. Only by allowing people to have enough food and clothing, and don’t have to worry about life, can they Better improve their overall quality and improve the city's basic conditions." Purficott rubbed his hands and wrote down a paragraph on paper.
In order to experience the life of ordinary people as much as possible, she did not light the stove tonight, and she was wearing clothes that were no different from those of ordinary people.
It had to be said that this really made her feel very cold, and it made her unconsciously recall the days when she was a child before time travel. At that time, she also experienced frostbite on her hands.
"It's really an experience I haven't seen for a long time! It seems that there is another one, which is the treatment of various diseases caused by low temperature." Purficott smiled at himself and devoted himself seriously to it again At work.
(End of this chapter)