Chapter 524 Salt and Ham (Two in One)
Since leaving Enrico’s house, Nagmi has obviously become much more taciturn than before.
Sechinger didn’t take it seriously, only thinking that she was frightened by the bustling scene of Castle Joan of Arc.
In Sechinger's eyes, not to mention Feiliu Castle, even Castle Joan of Arc is considered a relatively large city.
For the North Mountain people who have been living in Langsand County all year round, Fort Joan of Arc is probably the end of the world.
After changing into a carriage in Sugua Town, Sechinger and others arrived at Fort Joan of Arc in just over a day.
Horn naturally brought a few key figures to greet him in person, but in order to prevent riots, they held a welcoming ceremony in the suburbs.
On the solid road paved with mortar, colorful triangular flags are planted on the roadside, dancing with the autumn wind. Occasionally, citizens or villagers passing by will look here in surprise.
Sechinger got off the carriage. After sighing at the speed of the carriage and the road, he raised his head and saw the temporary door beams at both ends of the road at first glance.
There are black and red vertical flags hanging on both sides of the door beam, and in the middle is a long strip of red cloth with the words "Welcome North County Friendly Seitzinger" written in white standard Leia letters. ·Urinots".
This welcome ceremony, which Horn considered to be unsound, obviously made Sechinger extremely satisfied.
Seeing Seizinger approaching, Horn, who was wearing a bishop's holy robe without the complicated patterns, walked up to face Seizinger.
“Welcome to Castle Joan, Your Excellency Seizinger, I have wanted to see you for a long time.”
“It is an honor to meet you, Your Excellency Horn.”
First he was surprised by the age of the farmer leader, and then Seitzinger smiled heartily and gave Horn a bear hug.
After a bunch of messy ceremonies, Sechinger, Horn and others split up into two groups. Sechinger's attendant and daughter went to a special country villa to station, while Seizinger himself went to the Holy Advent Hall with Horn to discuss the matter. talk.
Pull Earl Sechinger to sit down and take out a set of bone china teacups from the cabinet. Horn poured him a cup of black tea.
Although black tea was the favorite drink of the middle class of the empire, especially the nobility and citizens, Seisinger did not like it. He would rather choose a glass of potato root wine.
To show politeness, he picked it up and took a sip: "Thank you for the black tea...Okay, can we talk about the problem of the North workers?"
" Of course." Horn crossed his legs, took a sip of black tea, and replied calmly, "Your people can come to Langsander County to work, but I hope to sign a contract with you."
"What contract?" Seizinger breathed a sigh of relief and became alert at the same time.
In his mind, these high-paying jobs must have been taken away by locals, like the North Mountain people.
Instead of ordinary lords, there is a high probability that they will be expelled, firstly to win over the hearts of the locals, and secondly to prevent the outflow of money.
But Horn agreed so easily, which made him feel that there would be some kind of trap.
“First, those who enter the country normally need to register and be issued a labor certificate.
Second, those who enter the country illegally and work illegally will be deported and their rights will not be guaranteed.
Third, do as the Romans do. When you enter Langsand County to work, you must abide by the laws of Langsand County. If you violate them, we have the right to expel them. If a crime is committed, both parties will be tried jointly. ”
“No more?” "Sechinger waited for a while before asking.
"No, just these few requirements. "Horn smiled and added some milk to the black tea, "North County and Longsand County are both Cush people, they are one family. ”
Seisinger stared at Horn for more than ten seconds before he let down his guard and even took a drink of the black tea he didn’t like.
He thought Horn would ask Sechinger for compensation or limit the number of personnel, but he didn't expect it to be resolved so quickly.
"This puts me at ease... When will dinner start?" Seitzinger put down his tea cup and asked, touching his belly.
“No hurry, let’s talk about other things first, such as North County.”
“North County? What do you want to talk about? It’s a miserable place, otherwise it wouldn’t be so Many people came to Longsand County.”
“Haha, what I want to talk about is the solution to the hundreds of years of poverty in North County.”
"Is it 'If you want to be rich, have more children and build roads'?" This was a slogan Seisinger saw when passing through some hundreds of households, and he said it half sarcastically and half jokingly.
You know, poverty in North County is an eternal issue among the mountain people in North County.
There are no precious mines or fertile land in North County. Finally, there is a meadow for grazing, but it has to be competed with the Norn Kingdom next door.
But this young boy, who is no more than 20 years old, dares to brazenly reveal his plan to solve the hundreds of years of poverty in North County.
Doesn’t that mean that generations of sages in North County over the past few hundred years have lived on dry food?
"You know what brings wealth?"
"Farms and mines."
"No." Horn shook his head, "Labor and exchange."
>Looking at Seisinger's confused face, Horn knew that he had not attended the classic Eden economics in the Father's College.
However, the conversation between the two will not last long. Horn is not going to teach Eden Economics on the spot, but will simply summarize it.
"Seeds won't germinate if they are held in your hands. Ore buried in the mountains is worthless. It is farming and digging that makes it valuable. The act of farming and digging is labor.
Similarly, food and iron ingots are put together Money will not be created out of thin air in the warehouse, but it needs to be exchanged and sold on the market to get the money."
Picking up the black tea to moisten his throat, Horn continued:
< br>"How to work and exchange efficiently is the key to obtaining wealth. North County is poor for two reasons.
The first is the poor geographical climate. Proven traditional and efficient labor such as farming and mining None were successful.
The second is that the exchange conditions are not good. Not only are they in a harsh highland, but they also have no merchant culture.
But this does not mean that it is completely hopeless. If the primary industry is not good, there will be no secondary and tertiary industries. Even if the road conditions are poor, we can still build roads. "
Thousand River Valley is said to have a high terrain, but based on calculations from the "Imperial Geographic Atlas", Horn estimated that the altitude of the four plain counties is only about 200 meters, and the altitude of the five mountain counties is only about 1,000 meters. Meters up and down.
The average altitude may not be as high as that of the Shanxi-Shaanxi region. It mainly suffers from the Gaotai Mountains in the middle and the Longmian Mountains to the east.
The former separates the Emerald Sea in the south. The warm current of the Yangtze River was blocked, which blocked the warm current of Yanghai in the east, resulting in the barrenness of this area
These mountainous counties may seem large, but probably more than half of them are uninhabited land. Who knows how many treasures there may be.
The three counties of North Mound, Mound, and North are barely considered the foothills of the Longmien Mountains, and they belong to the same mountain range and the same plate. It doesn't make sense that the first two are rich in mineral deposits, but the latter are just forest trees, right?
“No, our place is full of saline-alkali land and poisonous pools. Although there are copper mines, they are very deep and cannot be mined at all.”
“That’s not the case. Must..." Seeing Sechinger's unconvinced expression, Horn did not continue, but changed the topic.
"Even if you don't have these, you can still engage in animal husbandry. In such a big place, you can't raise cattle, sheep and horses, but you can still raise donkeys, mules and pigs." Horn stood up and took out pen and paper from the cabinet next to him, "I Let me give you a simple calculation. In Fort Joan, 1 dinar can only buy 3 pounds of pork, but in North County, you can buy 5 or even 7 pounds.
In North County, 1 dinar can only buy 1 gallon or 10 pounds of grain, but in Fort Joan, 1 dinar can buy 16 or even 18 pounds of grain.
Let's ignore the freight and price changes first, in an ideal environment. In North County, you spend 1 dinar to buy 6 pounds of pork, transport it to Joan of Arc and sell it for 2 dinars
You then use the 2 dinars to buy 36 pounds of grain and ship it back. The price of selling North County is 3.6 dinars. With 6 round trips, 1 dinar can become more than 2,000 dinars.”
“It’s possible in a dream!” Saichin said. Ge obviously had veins on his forehead, "Do you think we haven't tried it?"
As he spoke, Sechinger's plan of resentment was about to materialize: "You have to pay for food and get cards along the way, and there are also freight charges. If we bring too much feed, the freight will go up. If we don't bring feed, the pigs will fall off the scale.
If they are cut in advance, unless it is winter, the dead pigs will stink and become plagued.
When I, my father and my grandfather drove 300 pigs to Fort Joan for sale, they would suffer from swine fever or fall off the scale along the way.
The churches and lords along the way set up private checkpoints. A pig charged me 15 dinars, which cost me 300 dinars. The Japanese devil’s bishop would charge me every time I went to a place, repeatedly. Received.
Finally transported it to Fort Joan and sold it, bringing the bribe. After doing an accounting, it was found that not only was there no profit but a loss of 1,500 dinars
Moreover, you will lose more when you buy grain and sell it back, because you have to pay money when you go back. The customs and bridge taxes paid along the way are worth the principal cost of the grain.
We lost 10 gold pounds at a time, and my grandfather fell ill when he returned home. Before he died, he said that in the future he would only sell pigs to areas within three days' drive.
Three days! We hadn't even come out of the mountains yet, and the nearest boar ranch was five or six days away from the nearest manor in Longsand County.
We forcibly sent the pigs there, and the tolls and costs along the way just covered the price difference. If we were lucky, we could earn seven or eight dinars per pig, but if we were unlucky, we would pay back the price. ”
“Then why not make it into ham or air-dried pork? Horn spread his hands and said, "You have so much wood, it shouldn't be a problem to use it to make air-dried pork, right?" ”
"No salt," Seisinger replied irritably.
With a strange smile, Horn turned around and took down a roll of newspapers from the shelf next to him. He flipped through it for a while before placing a page on the table.
Seisinger looked at the word "Pravda" in the newspaper and suddenly realized what Murat was talking about.
Looking down from the title of Pravda, Seizinger saw the price list of Red Maple Township at a glance. Rice crackers are 0.6 dinars per gallon, wheat is 0.7 dinars per gallon, and salt is per bushel ( 56 pounds) 18 dinars...
"Huh?" Seisinger suddenly put his head next to Pravda like a turtle with its head stretched out, as if he didn't recognize the words on it.
It is equivalent to 1 dinar and 3 pounds of salt. You must know that it costs half a dinar to buy 1 pound of salted fish from the Norns.
Generally, 1 pound of salt is needed to pickle 10 pounds of salted fish. Here in Horn, 1 dinar can pickle 30 pounds of salted fish.
“Where did you get so much salt?”
“Secret.” With a mysterious smile on Horn’s face, he opened his arms to the sky, “It is the invisible hand of the Holy Father. "The result of the movement."
This is a more religious statement. To be precise, 4 of Horn's holy wheel pumps are used to pump brine.
In order to be able to mine for longer, Horn just kept mining at a minimum to meet market demand.
If the power is fully used, nearly 3.6 million liters of brine can be extracted every month on average, and a small salt well can be drained in a month.
3.6 million liters of brine can produce about 700 tons of salt, which requires about 10,000 tons of peat.
10,000 tons of peat is the product of 600 alchemical priests working 90 hours. This was really hard to say in the past.
But now that the saliva ascending method can transform holy ones and alchemy priests on a large scale, it is not a problem.
Sometimes Horn really has to lament that the roar of industrial machines is so deafening that a clockwork runner pump is enough to bring down the entire salted fish industry in the Qianhe River Valley.
For some reason, Seisinger felt a little more fearful in his heart when he saw Horn's sleight-of-hand behavior.
"Those tax cards no longer exist. Live pigs can be replaced with dried meat and ham. As for shipping costs, luckily, our mortar needs a market and is used to build roads." Hornwold Go behind Sechinger and hold the back of his seat, "What worries do you have?"
"But why are you doing this?" Seisinger still doesn't understand, "No more. Is it possible that everyone can’t live with our ham?”
“Of course not, first of all, there is more food on the table, which is an improvement in living standards, and secondly, the supporting industry will require a lot of manpower and labor. consumption, which can expand the tax base.”
Seitzinger obviously didn't understand this rhetoric, so Horn had to change to a simple version:
"The principle is that the more I spend, the faster the money flows, the more prosperous the market, and I am willing to consume. The more people there are, the more taxes I receive.”
When people feel the market is booming, they have higher expectations for the future and are more likely to increase their spending when more money is available.
This kind of expenditure will circulate through various channels in the market, driving more consumption and investment, forming a "multiplier effect", causing each unit of expenditure to generate more than one unit of economic output. .
This means more transaction volume, more business growth and more jobs, resulting in a larger tax base.
The most important thing is that outsiders, such as the French people, see that the market in Langsand County is hot and have no reason not to invest.
As long as Horn can prevent inflation in time, it will be enough to bring the economy into a period of rapid development.
As for the issue of productivity matching, Horn can only say that the empire's productivity is already higher than its development level, but it was forcibly suppressed by Chaofan.
If there was no extraordinary, with the current population and level of the empire, it would not be a problem to advance civilization from the late Middle Ages to the level of the Renaissance to the mid-to-late 17th century.
Even if there is no clockwork industry, simply lifting the shackles of the empire and the church can allow the economy to develop.
"Money is only money when it flows. I give a small construction worker 30 dinars a month, and then the tax revenue will be hundreds of millions." Horn swallowed back the "applause" forcibly. , looking at Seisinger with a smile.
But Sechinger didn't speak. He looked at the price list on the table and suddenly felt Nagmi's mood.
The indescribable complex mood of confusion, jealousy and uneasiness.
“A new era, new ideas, and a new look.” Horn’s voice was more seductive than the devil. “The mountain people in North can sleep in warm houses without leaving their homes. With enough food, your people, relatives and friends will no longer have to envy others!"
Several big cakes drawn by Shengsun hit Sechinger on the head, making him dizzy.
(End of this chapter)