"What have you understood?"

The Duke of Raban almost slapped him. Why keep us in suspense and hesitate for so long without saying anything?

Casani, however, just smiled slightly: "This number is significant among 27,000 households, but what if this number is turned into 270,000 households?"

Even though the consumption tax per household ranges from 1 to 3.2 gold pounds, it's still high, but not as outrageous as before.

Seeing that Raban was still puzzled, Casani continued: "What if this number is 540,000 households? Your Grace, have you forgotten about the villagers?"

"Villagers? Are you referring to farmers?" The Duke of Raban first understood but remained skeptical, "Impossible, how much can farmers consume?"

Casani merely smiled without speaking, finally realizing what was amiss.

Raban had calculated only the population of the residents of Priest Town, neglecting the population of the villagers who would also come to the town to consume!

Unlike a straightforward independence war, the Thousand River Valley war seemed like a war, but internally it was two wars happening simultaneously.

One was repelling the invaders externally, while the other was eliminating the large landowners internally.

The large landowners supported Horn and Moliat in driving away the invaders, thinking they could enjoy the benefits of independence, only to find themselves becoming the benefits.

Their estates were partitioned, their forest hunting grounds divided, their assets and properties massively redistributed.

Through these two wars, Horn thoroughly shattered and reconstructed land distribution, rendering even perpetual lease rights a thing of the past.

The impact on the cities wasn't obvious yet.

But for the countryside, it was as if the Holy Alliance had wiped out the wealthiest class of the rural areas in one fell swoop.

On the corpses of these immensely rich people grew the most beautiful roses.

In just eight years, most farmer families experienced a drastic class leap.

Small landowners became farm owners, and Public Register Farmers turned into free farmers.

Besides the income from the fields, the mountain forests and fisheries open to the villagers were another enormous treasure.

The fishery owner, Grosien, is a typical example, snowballing his wealth from fish ponds and even becoming a public representative.

Excluding the farmers from the new five counties and Shattered Stone Plain, the Thousand River Valley already had 720,000 farmer households with astonishing war benefits.

This led to a short-term creation of a 5% middle-class rural population and 95% ordinary rural population in the Thousand River Valley.

Put into a Hundred Households District, it translates to about 400 middle-class rural households and 7,600 ordinary rural households.

Those with an annual income between 20 to 100 gold pounds were referred to as middle class, while those with less than 20 gold pounds were defined as commoners.

A regular farmer family with 60 acres of land could have a commercial grain income of around 3 gold pounds.

On top of that, able-bodied individuals could even work in small workshops in Priest Town or the Hundred Households District to earn extra money, and women could spin yarn at home for additional income.

This is not fabricated.

According to the Holy Alliance report, the average wheat yield per acre was 100 pounds, and the average rice yield per acre was 120 pounds, partly due to the farmers in Pingyuan County dragging down their Mountain County counterparts.

The average wheat yield per acre in the four plains counties was 120 pounds, while the rice yield reached 140 to 150 pounds.

16,128 small-scale water facilities and 13 irrigation canals and small canals weren't built for nothing.

Pushed horse-drawn seeders, hand-cranked threshing machines, and quality seeds weren't promoted for nothing.

The four-field crop rotation system wasn't popularized for nothing.

Even with the Holy Alliance's unified grain purchase, during the three grain tax-exempt years, the farmers still astonishingly had annual savings of 1 to 2 gold pounds.

That's nearly ten times the annual savings of the Horn family back then.

In the past, those grain merchants backed by the church and Leia engaged in barter, wildly suppressing prices due to the lack of price transparency.

Although it's now a unified purchase, with the increased grain production and transparent prices, the payments are in solid Dinar currency!

The Hundred Households District's public treasury, farmers' mutual aid organizations, extra wages, and rising prices, along with adequate savings, finally gave the farmers a desire to consume.

Having been freed from heavy taxation, the farmers now had the opportunity.

They wanted to buy cloth, purchase furniture, build new houses, and even buy supplementary food, including meat and sugar.

Beyond that, they also wanted to use these extra incomes for land improvements and production method optimizations.

Middle-class rural households might spend about 5 to 10 gold pounds annually, while ordinary rural households could consume forty to fifty Dinars annually.

The rural folks spent less, but there were so many of them.

Accumulating bit by bit, their consumption rivaled that of cities across 21 counties.

Casani exhaled a long breath, setting down the feather pen in his hand.

Looking at Raban's complex expression, though he was not a Holy Alliance citizen, Casani felt an inexplicable pride.

But after the pride came an inexplicable melancholy.

The Duke of Raban held the verification paper silently for a full five minutes.

He slowly sat back in his chair: "Alright, I admit I underestimated them a bit... but I still have a question, who will supply the goods?"

Among the many questions about the Holy Alliance, this was indeed a very crucial one.

Coincidentally, Casani happened to know about this.

"You may not know, but the Holy Alliance subsidizes and offers interest-free loans to new factories..."

The reason behind the Duke of Raban's question being critical lies in the challenging process of establishing a factory.

Though it's not comparable to the founding of factories in later eras, gathering the initial capital and persisting until the first profit and breaking even, each stage is a significant test.

A slight misstep could lead to a broken financial chain.

In this era, building a factory is indeed heavy asset entrepreneurship, with weak risk resistance.

The inability to recruit workers, lack of production experience, or a single mistake in other parts of the empire could lead to bankruptcy and escape.

But the Holy Alliance is different. The inability to recruit workers, insufficient experience, inability to produce good goods, products without markets... none of these are issues.

Because at this time, the Holy Alliance extends its visible hand to provide subsidies and interest-free loans to factories and helps them find markets through favor market connections.

This forcibly maintains the factories until they become profitable.

Otherwise, why would the Workshop Masters and farmers be so passionate, given that His Majesty Saint Sun truly distributes money and land?

Of course, the money and land Horn distributes are not his own.

Elsewhere, King Jiji and the distant Puliano Pope inexplicably felt a twinge in their hearts.

"You mean to say that Horn is essentially giving money to farmers to get them to spend, money to workshops to get them to produce, and money to bureaucrats to get them to collect taxes?"

Casani blinked, then suddenly chuckled: "Indeed, that's exactly the case, and he really succeeded."

Essentially, Horn sends out money and retrieves it using various means, but what's the point?

The Duke of Raban sensed something but couldn't quite grasp it.

This seemingly absurd scene, he keenly felt, might hold some reasoning.

If it were a college student who studied Holy Path Economics at Ry Court Barracks, they could clearly explain the difference to the Duke of Raban.

The essence of gold coins is circulation, while the essence of trade is barter.

Measuring goods with gold coins is actually putting the cart before the horse.

Gold coins circulating in society only to return to Horn's hands seems as if nothing has changed.

But farmers obtained new tools and clothes, and Workshop Masters got new laborers and houses.

The most significant reason for Horn's economic growth over four years that neither of them realized is

Horn, through ransoms, the Pope's treasury, grain speculation, among other actions, successfully exchanged near a million gold pounds of currency.

Over 200,000 gold coins, tens of millions of silver coins!

1,000 small carts couldn't carry it all!

Using these agile and convenient universal equivalent exchangers allowed this monetary magic to take effect.

However, this touches on an issue commonly debated among the Holy Alliance's consulting scholars today.

Gold coins are still too heavy, too inconvenient, and too few; could they be made lighter and more abundant?