There have been good and bad changes in Hurd. Pen ~ fun ~ pavilion www.biquge.info

On the bright side, Hurd is becoming more and more like a Chinese.

Eight years ago, after arguing with Zhu Jinglun because he couldn't stand being idle in Menxia Province, Hurd ordered the formation of a supervision department, named the Department of Counseling, which was responsible for comprehensively inspecting the Ming Dynasty officials at all levels, and set up a counsellor to preside over the work, in fact, he was still responsible to Hurd in the end.

Hurd is a person with a strong sense of principle, or a person with a strong desire for power, he values power far more than ordinary people, and he is very reluctant to intervene in matters within the scope of his power and responsibility, so the counselling department really works in accordance with the procedure, and it is very difficult to find out the problems of some officials, from major problems of corruption, to small problems of abuse of favors, all of which have been investigated and punished, and a large number of officials have lost their hats.

This made the Ming officialdom hate Hurd monstrously, plus Hurd was a foreigner, and there were a large number of people who rejected him, so for a while he was unable to move an inch in the officialdom, and he was unwilling to actively cooperate with others in any department. The most serious thing is that there was an assassination incident, Hurd's carriage was damaged by a gang of dead soldiers, Hurd was seriously injured at the time, and the mastermind behind it has never been identified.

After this assassination, Hurd began to change, the first thing was that he got married, and he married A-Yao, a Ningbo girl who had been his lover for many years. Ah Yao does not dislike Hurd's disfigured face, and has been taking care of his life with all these years. But Hurd always had a white supremacy in his mind, and he was in China for fame and fortune, not really being able to accept the yellow race as an equal.

But after this incident, I don't know what happened to Hurd's mentality, he proposed to A-Yao, and the two held a wedding after he recovered from his injury, and used Chinese-style weddings, inviting officials of all sizes from all over the country to participate.

Hurd's marriage to a Chinese girl soon brought him some benefits, first of all, he was more acceptable, he used to be a foreigner, but now he is a Chinese son-in-law, and everyone began to reluctantly accept his identity from the heart.

The second change is that Hurd has become more human. That's the bad side.

Hurd, who speaks of human feelings, has begun to turn a blind eye to those who do not violate discipline seriously, and in addition to having no tolerance for corruption, he has begun to accept those who use their power to install one or two relatives.

The most serious thing is that Hurd himself began to talk about human feelings. He was always open to his past subordinates, and he also began to receive gifts from his past subordinates every New Year's holiday.

At the beginning, this change made Zhu Jinglun feel that the Chinese officialdom culture was so strong that even a foreigner like Hurd could reverse it. But he soon felt that this was not a good thing. He found that Hurd was deliberately sheltering and even cultivating his roots.

Hurd started from the customs, which was the first modern department of the Ming Dynasty, so later there were a large number of officials from the customs in the Ming government, who infiltrated the various yamen, and many of them were the core figures responsible for the formation of the yamen. Most of the high-level officials of the Ming Dynasty have nothing to do with Hurd, but among the middle level, it can be said that at least one-third of them are from the customs. Another third are officials who have interned in the customs, and only one-third of the officials trained by the real Ming officialdom system itself.

In this way, Hurd's power is really too terrifying, once the older generation of officials slowly grows old, the next generation of Ming officialdom will not be Hurd's power.

It wasn't until the year before last that Zhu Jinglun discovered this problem, and soon took advantage of the problem of the police system to hit Hurd hard, forcing Hurd to issue a rule that all officials who have family ties cannot work in the same department, and ruthlessly dismissed a number of officials and even police officers who were mixed in the police system because of personal relationships.

But Hurd's foundation still can't be shaken, at this time Zhu Jinglun began to pay attention to Hurd, he knew that Hurd had given birth to three children in recent years, Hurd was very good to the children, and hired a tutor for the children, but he did not invite Western teachers like the British aristocracy, but invited a well-known Confucian, Wang Tao, a well-known editor in the Hong Kong newspaper industry, to tell his sons about Confucianism.

Hurd turned out to be training his next generation in the Chinese way.

This is a joke in officialdom, but in Zhu Jinglun's eyes, what he sees is a Hurd who is trying to be a Chinese.

Zhu Jinglun didn't know why Hurd became like this, and in many conversations with him, he could still clearly feel that this person was still a white man in his bones, but why did he let himself behave like a Chinese?

Thinking about it, Zhu Jinglun was sure that Hurd did this just in the hope of being accepted by the Chinese, including marrying a Chinese woman and speaking Chinese feelings for such purposes, he knew that he could not fight with an official group alone, he needed to cooperate with these people, but he was already a provincial servant under the door, his status was comparable to that of the prime minister, and he also held the power of the advisory department to supervise the real power of hundreds of officials, he still had to cooperate with others, what did he do?

Thinking about it, Zhu Jinglun felt that he had figured out Hurd's mentality, Hurd was not satisfied with his current status, he still wanted to go further, he was better than the prime minister, but after all, he was not the real prime minister, he still wanted to really stand in the position of Chen Zhiting, the prime minister, and deal with all the state affairs of the Ming Dynasty.

At this point, Zhu Jinglun thinks that he knows why Hurd has changed, because of his ambition, he has changed for his own ambition.

Hurd's change made Zhu Jinglun also feel a little troublesome, and appointed Hurd as the prime minister, not to mention whether the officials of the Ming Dynasty could accept this kind of thing, even Zhu Jinglun himself could not accept it, because he knew that no matter what, it could not change the fact that Hurd was an Englishman.

This was the most glorious time of the British Empire, no matter where an Englishman was, they could not give up the kind of psychological identification with the British Empire, no matter what kind of success was achieved in the Ming Dynasty, Hurd always had a desire to return to England and return home.

Historically, although the Qing government gave Hurd supreme dignity and even rewarded him with titles such as Prince Shaobao, what made Hurd more satisfied was the knighthood given to him by the Queen of England.

Of course, it is not impossible to appoint Hurd, to the level of the prime minister's official position, in fact, it has little to do with personal ability, and the only reason for appointing Hurd can only be to see if Hurd can bring enough benefits to Daming.

Let Chen Zhiting be the prime minister because of the background that Chen Zhiting represents, he is the representative of the gentry class in Xin'an County, Xin'an County is where Zhu Jinglun started, Chen Zhiting is the prime minister, and a large number of scholars and doctors in the Ming Dynasty can return to their hearts.

So let Hurd be the prime minister, unless the British Empire behind him can give enough benefits to the Ming Dynasty.

However, now the Ming Dynasty is probably only a small weight in the diplomatic map of the British Empire, that is, it is not as good as the British colony India, nor as an emerging European power as Prussia, or even as a small European country close to Britain like Belgium.

Therefore, it is probably still a very distant thing for the British Empire to pay enough attention to the Ming Dynasty and give up enough interests to support Hurd to come to power.

At present, there are four near-term worries, one is the world economic crisis, one is the war between France and Vietnam, the other is the Japanese invasion of Taiwan, and the last is the Northern Expedition of the Taiping Army.