Chapter 1173: I Want All of Them
“I’m giving you the frame. Implementation, coordination between departments — that’s yours to work out. Barov Mons will supervise the whole project.”
“As you command,” Barov said, hand to chest.
Roland nodded. Years of working together had filed away any reflex Barov once had toward open resistance. He would raise objections through proper channels, in measured language — but he would not balk. The interlocking relationships between departments inside the Administrative Office meant he could actually pull the levers of a project this size, provided the will was there. It was.
“Now listen carefully.” Roland gestured to Nightingale, who fixed a sheet of white cloth to the blackboard.
The room exhaled as one.
The cloth was printed: main features of the policy, each one accompanied by both text and a diagram. Soraya had made it — crude compared to a proper presentation, but infinitely clearer than a spoken summary delivered to two hundred people with different backgrounds and different ideas of what words meant. Roland had spent enough of his previous life making slides for engineering proposals to know that a visual aid bought ten minutes of coherence for every hour it cost to produce.
The population structure of Graycastle told the story of a world with low productivity and nothing else. High-ranking nobles became lords, built cities, distributed land to subordinates. Cities grew until they could not sustain themselves, at which point their overflow trickled outward into villages and satellite towns. The cities stopped expanding. The gap between noble and commoner calcified. Walking through a prosperous city, you would see markets and walls and towers — and miss the fact that far more people lived in the farmland surrounding it, bound to soil they could not leave, producing just enough to feed the lords above them and keep themselves alive.
That was the trap. Low productivity meant labor was always attached to land. People could not move. Could not accumulate. Could not become anything other than what the land required them to be.
The Administrative Office had tracked Graycastle’s demographic shifts while Roland was recruiting refugees, and their estimate had settled somewhere between two and four million total subjects. The wars of the second prince and Princess Garcia, and then the plague the church had spread, had stripped away somewhere between five and six hundred thousand — Eagle City in the South, Valencia in the East, both razed. Even so, a considerable population was scattered across the kingdom, and only a small fraction had drifted west to the Western Region.
Roland intended to compel the rest.
Within a month, they would harvest the first wave of Golden Two wheat on a large scale. High-yield cotton had already spread across the Port of Clearwater — fabric for the whole kingdom was no longer a question of when, only of logistics. One person could now produce what ten or twenty had before. The land no longer required the same density of bodies to hold it.
And Graycastle was, on paper, unified. The power that had once scattered across a hundred local lords now ran through the central government. The lords still existed, but they answered to secondary administrative bodies, which answered upward. The chain of command was real. It could carry orders.
Migration equality — the policy that guaranteed any citizen’s right to transfer, and that their property rights would be honored on arrival — was the mechanism designed to absorb the friction that mandatory relocation would otherwise generate. A farmer with two acres moved to Neverwinter and was granted two acres by the Administrative Office. The math was simple enough that most people could see it was not a theft. Whether they wanted to come was a separate question.
Roland knew they would not want to come.
Leaving a place your family had worked for generations was not a calculation; it was a wound. History offered no shortage of examples of governments that had resolved this problem through violence — illegal seizure, coerced purchase, legislation that criminalized refusing to work. Roland was not planning any of that. He was planning social assistance, guaranteed property, a life with wages rather than subsistence. But he was also planning to make the move happen regardless. He understood what that meant. He did not pretend otherwise.
The second directive was cross-border recruitment — mandatory migration, but applied outside Graycastle’s borders.
The Kingdom of Dawn had survived the church’s invasion with its sovereign intact, which made a puppet administration possible. The Kingdoms of Everwinter and Wolfheart had not been so fortunate. Their royal lines were gone, replaced by competing lords who each claimed blood descent from the crown and none of whom could compel the others. A puppet government was out of the question — there was nothing coherent enough to puppet.
Barov saw the next cloth go up on the board and spoke before he could stop himself: “You mean — the First Army?”
“Do you think the nobles will peacefully allow us to strip their labor force while we explain our population policy to them?” Roland picked up his tea. “They care about power, land, and wealth. The Battle of Divine Will means nothing to them. We’ll reason with them first. What they decide after that is their concern.”
“I’ll make them yield, Your Majesty,” Iron Axe said. Flat, certain, the way a door closing sounds certain.
Cross-border recruitment would be harder than domestic migration by every measure. Without Golden Two seed to leave behind and sustain a city’s food supply, the departure of large numbers of people would collapse the entire urban ecosystem — farms without farmers, markets without buyers, cities without populations. It was war conducted through economics rather than weapons, and the casualties would be lower, but it was still war.
The combined population of Everwinter and Wolfheart sat somewhere around three million. Accounting for those killed in the fighting against the church, Neverwinter could reasonably draw one and a half million immigrants from those two kingdoms alone. The relocation would take years — but it was the fastest available path to the scale Roland needed. That was why he had told Barov to double the population within a year. Half a year, if possible.
“Do you have any requirements for these immigrants?” Barov asked, pencil ready. “Skilled workers, farmers, literacy levels?”
Roland had screened refugees before. In the early days he had to — resources were too scarce to take in everyone who showed up at the gate. Those days were behind him.
“No,” Roland said, and his fist closed on the table. “I want all of them.”
Barov pressed his handkerchief to his forehead and said nothing for a moment. “I… see.”
“Last.” Roland nodded to Nightingale, who brought up the final cloth. “The Administrative Office will promote births through advertising, tax reductions, and direct rewards. This policy won’t produce visible results as quickly as the other two — but it will be the most important one, long-term.”
He let his gaze move across the room: young officials, old ministers, scribes pressing against the walls.
“For this last policy,” he said, with the first smile of the morning, “I hope everyone in this room will set a proper example for the public.”
Chapter 1173: I Want All of Them Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
“I’m only giving you the basic frame of this project. You have to figure out how to implement the policy and coordinate with the other departments yourself. Barov Mons should be supervising the whole project.”
“As you command,” Barov responded while clapping his hand over his chest.
Roland nodded in satisfaction. After years of training, Barov had learned to obey his order without questioning his authority no matter how unreasonable it seemed to be.
The close and intertwined relationship between each department within the Administrative Office enabled Barov to allocate resources for a big project like this.
“Now, listen carefully,” Roland said as he instructed Nightingale to stick a sheet of white cloth to the blackboard. “First is the migration within the Kingdom of Graycastle…”
“Wow…” the crowd exclaimed involuntarily when they saw the content on the canvas.
On the canvas were the several main features of this policy, supplemented with clear instructions in both text and picture formats. This was actually a very crude, primitive powerpoint created by Soraya. As a former engineering student, Roland believed that making slides was one of the basic skills to negotiate with employers. Compared to a lengthy, dry speech, slides would obviously be more visually appealing to audience.
The population structure in Graycastle reflected how manpower was distributed in this particular age. Nobles of a higher rank, after becoming a
lord, built their own cities and distributed their lands to their subordinates. With the increase in the population and the accumulation of wealth, big cities gradually found it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves. Subsequently, some city residents moved out to surrounding villages to continue to support those big cities.
As a consequence, cities ceased to expand, creating a huge income gap between the nobles and civilians. Although these large cities appeared to be prosperous and boisterous at the first glance, the population of the surrounding towns and villages was actually much bigger than that of the city they were supporting.
However, Roland knew the fundamental reason for this phenomenon was low productivity. Due to low productivity, civilians were bound by the lands they owned. For the rest of their life, they had no choice but to work laboriously in their fields to support the extravagant lifestyle of the nobles, with little they could keep to themselves.
During the previous years when Roland had been recruiting refugees, the Administrative Office had paid special attention to the change in the local demographic and made a rough estimate. They concluded that the population of Graycasle should be between two million to four million. The wars waged by the second prince and Princess Garcia, and the plague spread by the church had caused a loss of 500,000 to 600,000 in the population and also razed the Eagle City in the Southern Territory and Valencia in the Eastern Region to the ground. Nevertheless, there were still quite a considerable number of people scattered around Graycastle, and only a very small portion of them had chosen to settle down in the Western Region.
But now, Roland was determined to force those people to move here.
It was predicted that they would soon harvest a great quantity of wheat grown from Golden Twos within a month. Meanwhile, high-yield cotton had also been widely grown in the Port of Clearwater. It would not be long before they could supply fabric to people in the entire kingdom. Currently, big cities no longer had to rely on manpower to sustain themselves, for one person could yield products 10 or 20 times they used to.
Further, Roland had, technically, unified Graycastle on an administrative level, as all the power that used to belong to local lords was now held by the central government. The lords would have to obey the orders issued by secondary administrative bodies.
The unification of the kingdom thus provided an excellent opportunity to implement his new migration policy.
The so-called migration equality referred to the equal treatment of any or all citizens’ rights to migrate their family members. It was an effective way to reduce conflicts that the mandatory migration policy might spark among the public.
For example, a migrant who used to have two acres of land would be granted the same amount of land by the Administrative Office after he moved to Neverwinter. This strategy would not only expedite the development of the deserted land in the northwest but would also effectively solve the labor shortage problem in Neverwinter.
However, Roland foresaw it was not going to be a pleasant process to drive people out of their native towns to a completely foreign city.
To persuade people to abandon their native land and work in a plant would need a stronger reason than the simple explanation of “emancipation”. Historically, the road migrants had trodden on was never unstained with the blood of uncooperative protestors. The government had the nasty tradition of stripping villagers of their properties through illegal purchase and occupation. Some countries even had a history of threatening unemployed refugees to work in factories via legislation and punishments.
Although Roland did not intend anything like this to happen and was actually planning to provide social assistance to migrants, he was determined to restructure the demographic.
He knew what he was doing.
The second requirement was cross-border recruitment, which was basically the same as mandatory migration only that the targetted demographic was
residents living beyond Graycastle.
Unlike the Kingdom of Dawn that survived the war, both the Kingdom of Everwinter and the Kingdom of Wolfheart lost their sovereigns after the church’s invasion. According to Hill, these two kingdoms had not fully recovered yet. All the lords claimed that they were the blood of the royal families, and nobody seemed to be able to persuade the others.
Given that, it was out of the question to establish a puppet government like Roland had done to the Kingdom of Dawn.
“Do you mean… that we should send the First Army?” Barov blurted out as he saw a new sheet was put onto the board.
“Do you think that the nobles will allow us to take away their properties while doing nothing?” Roland said matter-of-factly as he sipped his tea. “They care about nothing but power, wealth and more lands. They don’t give a damn about the demons or the Battle of Divine Will. Of course, we still need to reason with them first. As for whether they accept it or not, that’s another story.”
“I’ll let them yield, Your Majesty,” Iron Axe said sternly.
Cross-border recruitment would definitely be more savage than mandatory domestic migration. Without Golden Twos, many civilians would have to relocate to other cities. The loss of population and food would then lead to the destruction of the entire urban ecosystem. It was, therefore, another form of war, only that the loss would be relatively small compared to an aggressive one.
The First Army was the key to this plan.
The population of the Kingdom of Everwinter and the Kingdom of Wolfheart was around 3 million. Except for those killed in the battles against the church, they could provide Neverwinter 1,500,000 immigrants. The relocation might take several years but it would also be the fastest way to increase the population. That was why Roland asked Barov to double the population within a year, or even within half a year.
“Your Majesty, do you have any requirements for those immigrants?” Barov asked. “Like they have to be skilled workers, farmers or literates?”
Roland had screened refugees before, but at that time, due to limited resources, he had not had the liberty to take in all of them. However, things were quite different now.
“No,” Roland answered as he clenched his fist. “I want all of them.”
“I… I see,” Barov said while mopping his sweat-dampened forehead.
“Last but not least,” Roland continued as he instructed Nightingale to show the last slide. “The Administrative Office shall encourage births through advertisement, tax reduction and rewards. Although compared to the previous two policies, you won’t be able to immediately see the result of this one. However, it’s going to be the most important policy in the future.”
Roland paused for a second and then said smilingly to his audience, “For this last policy, I hope everyone in this room could set a good example for the public.”