Chapter 1052: Chapter 995: The Cornerstone of Black Snake Bay’s Prosperity

Edwin was still talking, while the wheels rolled over the rough flagstone road.

As they entered the inner city, the mud splattered on earlier when entering the city—mud that carried the sickly sweetness of the market and the smell of livestock—was all flung off.

The humid heat in the air had not diminished in the slightest, but that earlier scent made of spices, sweat, and the crack of whips gradually subsided.

Turning off the noisy main road near the spice trading station, the carriage drove into a quieter, more desolate side street.

They called it a side street, but in fact it was the road leading to the Moonlight Palace.

On both sides of the road stood two rows of tall coconut trees; they cast long shadows, yet could not cover up the stifling heat near the ground.

That cloying, omnipresent sweet and rotten odor seemed to be replaced by another smell.

It was a smell mixed from cheap ink, linen not thoroughly washed, a large amount of human sweat, and a faint moldy dampness peculiar to low wooden buildings.

Beyond this smell, in the distance one could see the tall Moonlight Palace, or by its current name, Moonlight Mansion.

Compared with the street in front of the Moonlight Palace four or five years ago, the low shacks had turned into stilt houses, three- or four-story brick-and-tile buildings, and churches.

In front of the church there even stood a white marble statue of an Angel.

The Black Snake Bay People naturally would not miss such an opportunity; they took out purple pigment and gave the Angel’s eyes and breasts a few finishing touches.

On the street, those coming and going were all government officials and councillors carrying document bags or wearing Black Snake Bay shirts.

In front of these brick buildings one could even see soldiers and tax police standing guard, making it far more oppressive than the market.

"These two sides are what?" Horn asked Dass, for this was clearly something Edwin did not know.

Dass glanced around and thought for a moment before speaking: "This is Official Street. Look, that’s the gendarmerie office, that’s the City Hall Labor Bureau, that’s the court, that’s the City Hall Tax Bureau..."

This was different from Horn’s side of the world: these government offices were not concentrated in a single building, but scattered along a whole street in different buildings.

Between these government institutions, one could also see restaurants, cafés, bakeries, stationery shops, and so on.

Under the coconut trees and the eaves of the brick houses were newsboys with shoulder bags slung across their backs.

Horn’s gaze lingered on these children; he turned his head: "These children, are they from the relief homes?"

The relief homes were in fact derivative institutions of the Prohibition of Child Slave Labor Act that Horn had passed back then.

At present, in the three county-seat cities of Black Snake Bay—Solaburg, Celestial Maiden City, and Long Embankment City—they all existed.

The ones they mainly relieved were human child slave laborers who had been separated from slave status.

The Prohibition of Child Slave Labor Act and the Prohibition of Hereditary Slavery Act passed at the time were, in essence, measures to increase resistance against internal reproduction among slaves and the inheritance of slave status from father to son.

Banning child slave labor meant that plantation owners were faced with two choices.

Either the plantation owner signed a labor contract to turn them into free hired child workers—only the minimum age for slaves had been stipulated, not the minimum age for hired workers.

Or he simply ignored them or threw them off the plantation, leaving them to live or die on their own.

Of course, the latter situation was far more common.

Many children born of slaves would continue to work alongside their parents, only without bearing slave status themselves.

At that point, the relief homes would take action, find these free-status children, bring them to the relief homes to learn basic literacy and minor crafts, or assign them to workshops as contract apprentices.

The outstanding ones even had a chance to enter Long Embankment Middle School, and after graduation could even become gendarmes.

In addition, they were also excellent material for soldiers; many "slave-born children," in order to escape discrimination, chose to enlist.

"Ai—" Jeanne sighed beside him. "They’re all so young. If they were living in the Thousand River Valley, they might well be in school now."

"It’s already not bad like this. If they were in the Leia Kingdom, they might even end up being eaten."

Jeanne did not speak; she merely looked at the carriage in front, her expression complicated.

The current famine in the Empire was, to a large extent, being caused by Catherine’s manipulation of the grain market.

Yet it could not be denied that even if Catherine had not set out to crash Leia’s grain market, the Falan people would have done it, and the Leia people themselves might have crashed it.

At the very least, when Catherine was manipulating Leia’s grain market, she specifically reaped the grain merchants’ profits and did not cause too severe a famine.

But once the Falan and Leia local merchants took over, they naturally stopped acting like human beings.

Now Leia was plagued with famine from south to north, and they just happened to forbid the Royal Court and the Holy Alliance from sending in grain.

The Falan were even delighted to see Leia people starve to death or flee, conveniently weakening them for the next attack on Leia.

Thinking back on what she had seen and heard along the way, Jeanne could not help sighing: "Previously they said that the foundation of Black Snake Bay’s economy was built on the backs of slaves; this time I truly understand it."

"We should bring those monks who keep sniping at us for condoning the slave trade over here for a look. Are the slaves in Black Snake Bay that easy to change?" Dass thought of the monks’ remarks in the newspapers and grew furious.

But Horn cut Dass off: "They’re right to snipe at me like that. On the matter of slaves in Black Snake Bay, we indeed haven’t done well enough.

That’s why we are going south to investigate. Slavery is not something that can be solved overnight; right now there is still a window of time for change.

Otherwise, in the future, without fighting a major war, it will absolutely not be changed."

Within the Holy Alliance, the call to abolish slavery was not weak.

Part of it was indeed born of the Holy Path faction’s egalitarian demands; another part came from the various Workshop Masters.

This was not because those Workshop Masters were really so kind and benevolent.

The reason they petitioned for abolition was very simple—Black Snake Bay Federation’s huge mass of slaves had no consumption capacity.

Take a simple example: the owner of a clothing factory in Joan of Arc Castle would definitely dislike slavery.

Because he had clothes to sell, and clearly slaves had the need to buy but no ability to buy.

As for the plantation owner, could he wear a thousand sets of clothes by himself?

Of course plantation owners bought clothes, but what they bought were high-end Falan fabrics and garments, which the Thousand River Valley could not produce at all.

This was not merely hogging the latrine without taking a dump; it was plantation owners going to crap in someone else’s latrine while forbidding their own thousand slaves to crap at all.

For plantation owners, maintaining slavery was equivalent to an extremely low labor cost.

Slaves were both producers and owned assets; their labor cost was implicitly absorbed by society (for example, the plantation only bore the cost of basic subsistence).

But hired labor had to be paid wages at market price—actually paying wages!

Bright, shiny Dinars just handed out to former slaves—what a sinful waste!

And machines suffered depreciation and wear; they could not achieve the "zero marginal cost" exploitation of the slave era.

So Horn could be one hundred percent sure that once slavery was abolished, plantation owners would never be able to restore their current high profits.

Under normal circumstances, the solution would certainly be a North–South war.

Yet the Black Snake Bay Federation was now in a period of development and had only developed the basins of a few tributaries and main streams of the Ibe River.

A rash civil war might very well dampen the enthusiasm for development and let the Falan take advantage.

The deeper inland forests had not been developed at all.

In other words, Black Snake Bay had not yet reached a zero-sum point.

The Workshop Masters within the Holy Alliance did not yet crave the Black Snake Bay market that badly, so for the moment, everything still looked harmonious.

Although abolishing slavery would bring a fall in profits, the new profits from plantation expansion could still be used to cover it up.

If they left things alone now and waited until development could go no further, the Holy Alliance would inevitably face a brutal civil war in the future.

As the saying goes, the best physician cures the disease before it breaks out; the top politician extinguishes problems before they appear.

Horn did not consider himself a top politician, but he knew this was the great trend of history.

In another world, the same sickness had already flared up once; even a mediocre doctor would know where the illness lay and could prescribe in advance.

History would not give Black Snake Bay a second chance.

He was not sure whether the people of Black Snake Bay could seize it.

If they failed to seize it, Horn’s warband would become the first force to prepare for civil war.

The wheels stopped, and the manumitted slave driving the carriage knocked on the compartment: "Holy Father, we’ve arrived at Moonlight Mansion."