Xu Shiyang's verdict on the Zhou Shi case made many people feel very puzzled.

It stands to reason that even if such an act of defamation of the royal family is not criminalized, it should not be able to get the support of the crown prince himself.

This is definitely a compliment to the bookmaker.

Of course, this decision made those old literati also feel that although Xu Shiyang was a murderous and aggressive person, he was indeed generous enough.

If you think about it carefully, some people will find that Xu Shiyang's generosity is actually only for the Han people, and he has never shown mercy to other nationalities.

And after Xu Shiyang's tone of "killing and punishing Han people less and dealing with them leniently" came out, the evaluation of him on the market began to gradually become confused.

In the past few years, especially after the empire annexed the Great Zhou Dynasty and unified the world, the people who spoke highly of Xu Shiyang were the common people, because they finally lived a stable life, and they no longer had to worry about the imperial court taking over the people's property in order to satisfy the Tatars' coins, and they no longer had to worry about foreign enemies invading their hometowns to burn and loot.

Even the robbers who reigned in the mountains became much less - the muskets of the militia were not vegetarian.

Even the guild has ceased to exist because of the destruction of heroes from all walks of life.

The Reich Bank loans have very low interest rates, and there are no rollovers, and they can be repaid in installments, which is also no problem.

By paying off all these debts, the common people can enjoy all the surplus food after paying their taxes with peace of mind after a year of hard work.

You can keep it for yourself to eat, and if you have more surplus grain, of course, you can also sell it to the new imperial court, and the government will directly send people to the fields every year to buy grain at a uniform price, which is much fairer than the grain store of the landlord Lao Cai, and it can also save freight.

In the event of a disaster or for other reasons, the price of buying grain from state-run stores is also very low, and in some places where there is a shortage of grain, the price of buying grain is much lower than the price of selling grain, and many people prefer to sell all the grain they have on hand to the state and then buy grain to eat.

It is said that this is because the empire has a large amount of cheap Annan rice and Liaodong rice.

Of course, the specific reason is far more complicated than this, but the common people do not need to know or want to know the significance of policies such as "stabilizing prices" and "unified purchase and sales", they simply think that this is the policy of the imperial court to benefit farmers, and it is a benevolent government that has never been seen in all dynasties.

If the sky is beautiful, you can collect an extra three or five buckets per mu of land (since the national overhaul of water conservancy, the sky seems to be more and more willing to be beautiful), and everyone can take a good breath for the next year.

Every year, new grain is harvested and sold to the buyers of state-run grain stores who walk around the fields, or some people do not want to save a little effort, so they directly transport the grain to the state-run grain stores in the city, exchange it for thick or thin stacks of banknotes, and do some shopping in the city by the way:

I ran out of soap, so I had to buy ten or eight dollars to take home; You have to buy a few more boxes of matches, which is especially convenient for making a fire; Salt is a necessity and must be bought a little more; Lamp oil is not sold in state stores, but it is much cheaper to buy a pot from several families, which is much cheaper than selling it from street vendors.

There are also colorful cloths, this is getting cheaper and cheaper, and the mother-in-law at home wants to be red all day long, since she has sold the grain, then pull some back, and make a new dress for the mother-in-law and cubs for the New Year.

For those with better harvests, the budget also includes a small mirror for the mother-in-law; Small toys for children - rattles, little clay figurines or something; Naturally, there is also soju that I enjoy, and some people who can't live even want to cut two catties of braised pig's head meat.

The life of a small farmer is getting more and more nourishing.

In fact, in addition to working on the land, some people have begun to think of other ways to subsidize their families - such as buying a slave to do farm work, freeing the mother-in-law from the field and letting her work in the factory, which is even more profitable than working in the field all day.

Working in a factory, you can often get some labor protection supplies, such as work clothes, and things called "sanitary napkins" for female workers.

Those who do not have their own land now have a way to live, and they can choose to work in factories, work on state farms, or simply go to the border areas to earn a living.

For Han people who choose to go to the border wilderness, the imperial court directly sends a mother-in-law (a woman of a different race can at least be promoted to a commoner after marrying a Han Chinese, so it is also a very popular outlet for female slaves), as well as weapons, land, livestock, farm tools, furniture, seeds, rations for the first year, and a house.

The lives of the commoners were getting better and better, and under the guidance of the Imperial Propaganda Agency, they also knew that such a good life was obtained under the guidance of the Empire, the Cabinet, the Emperor, and the Crown Prince.

So, no matter what the old literati said, the probability that the common people would be willing to support the empire was very high.

And people other than the common people have a mixed evaluation of the empire.

First of all, even the harshest critics of the empire must admit that the empire is now far more powerful than the Great Zhou, and it can be said that it is thriving.

The benefits were all-encompassing – a large amount of land that had previously belonged to foreign countries was included in the bag, feeding the people who had no food and clothing, and making society more and more stable.

There are also those overseas treasures: rhino horns, ivory, pearls, hawksbill turtles, corals, etc., and so on, high-end luxuries that used to be enjoyed only by the truly wealthy have begun to enter the ordinary wealthy homes.

In the past, it was also a luxury, but there were not so unattainable spices, mink and the like, and they sank even more, and they were already items that could be owned and used by citizen families.

These benefits made those gentry and wealthy families secretly feel satisfied.

But in other ways, it's not so good, for example, the empire treats those mud-legged people too much.

First of all, what was once considered a normal means and the practice of the wealthy and wealthy families annexing homesteaders by means of debt is now completely unworkable.

The Imperial Bank was willing to take over the debts of the common people, but they would never admit interest and any interest in excess of the bank's benchmark, which made it unprofitable for the wealthy to lend to foreign countries.

If this economic problem can be remedied by investing in new industrial factories, the empire will sink into education, require all Han school-age children to go to school by forceful means, and break the monopoly of the scholars on knowledge.

Xu Shiyang once thought that his ban on the imperial examination would cause a mass opposition from the gentry.

In fact, this is not the case, for the gentry, whether it is the imperial examination or the examination of mathematics, physics and chemistry, there is actually no essential difference, the problem is the monopoly of knowledge.

The common people should not have access to knowledge, and this expensive luxury should have belonged only to the scholars, but Xu Shiyang's continuous popularization of education broke this monopoly, and when the children of ordinary people's families even surpassed the children of scholars' families in their test scores, the only thing that scholars should be proud of was given to ordinary people.

It's hard for them to tolerate.