For Zhu Youhua, who now controls almost the entire Nanyang Mansion, the most important thing at the moment is to resettle the displaced people.

There is a good saying that water can carry a boat and also capsize a boat, and the homeless people are the homeless people, which is an extremely unstable factor.

If these poor people who have been displaced by famine and bankruptcy are used well, they will become sufficient productive forces in a certain place, and they can quickly resume construction and stabilize the place.

But if they are not properly placed, they will riot at the slightest incitement, it is the White Lotus Sect, the Wenxiang Sect also needs a sufficient source of recruitment for all kinds of rogues, and more seriously, they will rise up and attack the state and break the government.

The fundamental reason for the emergence of displaced people is that they have no land to cultivate, so they cannot survive, and can only drag their families into exile.

The more displaced people, the less taxes the government collects, the shrinking number of soldiers, and every catastrophe will change the balance of power between the government and the rogues.

At present, for the Nanyang Palace, although there are money and soldiers, there is no fixed source of recruitment, each time it is just for each Wangzhuang to recruit soldiers, relying on full food and salary to attract homeless people to vote, and then carefully select some down-to-earth and hard-working young people.

However, in recent years, the heavens seem to be deliberately embarrassing the Ming Dynasty, and after a series of disasters in the past few years, such a source of troops has become less and less.

Although Zhu Youhua promised to reduce or reduce taxes within three years, under such a catastrophe, even if the imperial court did not collect taxes, the peasant households who had not been returning to farming for a short time would not be able to support themselves at all.

Zhu Youhua, who received the report of the first batch of output from the Changshi Division, decided to spend money to buy a batch of grain, and first solved the current supply problem.

The catastrophe in the whole territory of Henan for many years is not a lie, Zhu Youhua in the here and now really feels what is called despair.

Under such a generous policy, the farmers who were allocated to the fields in each wangzhuang still produced very little, barely enough to sustain themselves from starvation.

The reason why they did not riot was because Zhu Youhua's three-year exemption did not forcibly take away the little food they had in hand, and because it was in the territory of Wangzhuang, the local government had no right to interfere.

But this is not enough, because Henan, which has been in a severe drought, has recently experienced a particularly large locust plague that is rare in a century.

According to a report from a domestic servant in Luoyang, it was said that the locust plague had reached Luoyang, the whole city was hungry, and the price of grain had increased several times as before, and it was still rising.

The people, who did not have much land to cultivate, were almost defenseless when they encountered the locust plague again, coupled with the general rise in grain prices in Luoyang and even Henan, which soon caused the current Luoyang to be almost full of begging peasants.

This situation was a heavy blow to the imperial court, but it was something that the merchants were happy to see, and in the face of the locusts, almost all the grain merchants tacitly began to "stock up on grain".

Under the deliberate and covert manipulation of the major chambers of commerce, all the grain is allowed to enter but not to leave Henan, which causes the grain price in Luoyang to rise several times almost every day!

In this case, even the Fu Wangfu has already sensed the danger, and under the order of Zhu Changxun, he opened the palace courtyard and set up a porridge shed to help the hungry.

If it weren't for the fact that Wang Shaoyu, the chief soldier of Henan, heard the news and immediately sent the deputy chief soldier You Shihua to lead the Kaifeng officers and troops to Luoyang Town, I was afraid that Luoyang would have already caused a civil uprising.

According to the displaced people who fled to Nanyang, the area around Luoyang is full of locusts, and where the locusts pass, there is hardly even a living mouth left.

The locust plague is actually a swarm of migratory locusts.

These locusts will continue to migrate, according to the knowledge of the nine years of compulsory education in later generations, the next one who will cause disaster is Nanyang, where Zhu Youhua is located.

Now Nanyang, a hundred wastes are in the rise, many welfare facilities are under construction, but they have not yet been put into use, and Zhu Youhua does not have enough financial resources to ensure that he can take care of everyone.

Relying on the current 20,000 Nanyang battalions and a part of Yang Feng's subordinates, it is a little difficult to control the three places of Neixiang, Zhenping and Nanyang City, not to mention the entire Nanyang Prefecture.

If we don't expand our strength as soon as possible, after the locust plague moves south, it is very likely that the manpower of the battalions will be overstretched, and if we can no longer take good care of the hungry people who are swarming in, it is even more likely to provoke a series of civil uprisings in various places!

Natural disasters are a difficult problem that the current Ming Dynasty cannot avoid.

Zhu Youhua has also been thinking about this matter for the past few days, and he plans to start with two things to deal with the upcoming disaster.

First, he personally went out to negotiate with the merchants, snatched food from the tiger's mouth, and bought or robbed a large amount of grain that they had hoarded, and second, set up escort teams in various places to ensure the safety of the kings and villages in various regions.

If you want to do this, you need the unanimous support of the local wealthy class and stand on the same side as them.

Not long ago, some of the gentry in Nanyang Mansion or all over Nanyang came in person, and some sent people to arrive, but all those who came to give gifts actually planned to make friends with Zhu Youhua and Nanyang Wangfu.

For the power of these gentry, if Zhu Youhua wants to make the best use of it, he must give them visible benefits.

Zhu Youhua thought about it for a long time, and still considered that each household of the children of the gentry would be organized into a city defense army outside the order and used for patrol affairs in various places.

This city defense army, like the Nanyang Battalion and the Wangzhuang Guards, has its own structure and system, and Zhu Youhua will also find them official identities such as Yamen officials and guards in the guards.

Anyway, there are almost a large number of vacancies in yamen and guard offices in various places nowadays, which is not a difficult task.

First, the city defense army is a local security force independent of the Wangzhuang Guards and the Nanyang Battalion, and secondly, these children can also be used to ensure that the gentry really contribute to themselves, rather than one thing in front of them and another behind their backs.

The Nanyang battalion was used for conquest and rebellion, and when the Nanyang battalion went on the expedition, it must also have a reserve army similar to the police in later generations for the maintenance of law and order in various places.

In fact, the better the family background, the more room for improvement in the training of the Nanyang camp, whether it is the understanding of battle strategies or physical fitness, it is much better than the precarious poor family.

The benefits of using the children of the gentry to form an army are obvious, but there are also many hidden dangers in the control, such as the children of large families who are used to living a good life, and may not take the rich system rewards of the Nanyang camp seriously.

Maybe they can't accept the daily hard training and day and night city defense and patrol, so Zhu Youhua plans to let most of the children of the wealthy families who are transferred from the inner countryside and Zhenping always be the city defense army.

True strength does not allow these hidden dangers to exist.

In fact, recruiting the children of the gentry into an army is a compromise method, so that those big families can see the preferential treatment given to them by the Nanyang Palace, so that they can make a strong contribution.

There are pros and cons to such a method, but at present, the benefits still outweigh the disadvantages, anyway, this is just a way for Zhu Youhua to win the support of the gentry class to tide over the difficulties in the short term.

As for what the future holds, who knows?

As for the Wangzhuang Guards and the Nanyang War Barracks, which are not allowed to rub any sand into the lineage, when Zhu Youhua officially expanded the organization, he still had to select from the children of peasant households in Wangzhuang and the young and strong children in the guards.

Although these people are also farmers, they are also the most loyal, as long as they are given better welfare treatment, and then they continue to bring it, in the end, almost all of them are die-hard.

After arranging the establishment of the local city defense army and the Wangzhuang guard, in the middle of June of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, Zhu Youhua took Liu Yuqi and more than a dozen guards, dressed up in disguise, and rode to Kaifeng.

He plans to have a good deal with those merchants who are stockpiling grain.