According to the regulations on the vacation of Ming officials after the reform, in addition to the four long holidays of Qingming, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chongyang and Spring Festival, other days must be commuted according to the working hours of seven days off, of which the Spring Festival is from the first day of the first month to the fifteenth day of the first month.

Compared with the officials of the past, today's Ming officials finally have the concept of public and private time. Although in the past, officials were nominally expected to dedicate all their time to the king, it was up to them to decide whether or not to conduct their own business.

Some officials thought that apart from adjudicating cases, resting with the people, and admonishing the king, other specific matters were the work of the petty officials, and they should not bother themselves with trivial matters.

Therefore, before Chongzhen ascended the throne, some county commanders who went to remote places to serve had never done official business since they took office. The miscellaneous work of collecting money and grain and servitude was handed over to the master and the big families in the county to preside, and the disputes between the people were handed over to the minor officials and gentry to mediate, and the people must not be allowed to hand the paper in front of them, so as to seek a good reputation for settling lawsuits. And he himself studied and traveled in the Houya every day, and occasionally convened a meeting of scholars in the county to discuss poetry and articles.

After three or five years of mingling, let the local gentry and big families pay to advocate it, and make a name for ruling by doing nothing, and then they will be promoted. For the bosses who are determined to be officials in peace, this kind of subordinate who does not make trouble for himself and is satisfied with the local gentry is naturally a good subordinate they like.

After all, in such a world, if there is a subordinate who wants to do something, he will either use the benefits that have been distributed in the system first, or he will offend the gentry who control local affairs. Only people who don't do things will not make mistakes, and everyone talks about the stability of seniority. As long as you have the qualifications, there will naturally be a day when you will come out. Why bother tossing around, offending bosses, colleagues and local bigwigs, can this official still be a good one?

However, after ascending the throne, Chongzhen doesn't seem to see it that way, he would rather divide the official's time into public and private parts, admitting that officials have their own lives, rather than raising a group of officials who want to mess around all day long.

Since the imperial court, the regulations on commuting and vacation of officials have been implemented, and the examination method formulated by Zhang Juzheng has been reinstated. Although most of the test method has been changed, from the idea of heavy punishment to the core of reward, this new performance scoring method has finally eliminated many government and county officials who are in the position of corpse meal.

As a result of the ten years or so of these new decrees, officials have finally come to the idea that they are not working for the monarch, but for the state. What matters to work for the Lord is their loyalty, while what is important to work for the country is to have endless duties.

As long as you can complete your work during working hours, then you can enjoy your life after work, which is the so-called separation between public and private. Strictly speaking, the relationship of personal vassality between the upper and lower levels of officials is weakening, and the working relationship of keeping distance is gradually forming.

Although it does not completely change the humanistic society of the Ming Dynasty, compared with the past society, the personal vassal relationship that was originally taken for granted in the officialdom is slowly being regarded as an abnormal and harmful old tradition of official ethics. According to Chongzhen's view, this is the remnant of feudalism that should be eliminated.

For ruling ministers like Wen Tiren, they don't think there is any big difference between loyalty to the monarch and division commander and loyalty to the country and party. However, the latter's loyalty seems to be more exploitable than the former.

After all, in principle, there is only one object of allegiance to the people of the Ming Dynasty, and that is the great tomorrow who represents the heavens. But in practice, the gentry would always let themselves accept their allegiance on behalf of the great emperor in front of the local people, family members, and lower-level officials. Therefore, allegiance to the Son of Heaven will eventually be transformed into allegiance to officials, superiors, and family leaders.

This chain of allegiance, which is pressed by the first level, can sometimes make some powerful people feel that their freedom is restricted. It also made it difficult for the local gentry to incite the people against the emperor's orders, which would have the potential to directly disintegrate the order at the bottom. Therefore, it is better to make the populace loyal to the notion of a state that cannot think and dictate, so that they do not have to be so restrained when they accuse the emperor of his orders.

However, the ministers and gentry at this time did not notice that when the emperor lifted the compulsory allegiance of his subjects, it was equivalent to untying the compulsory allegiance of the people to others. In terms of political identity, the people of the Ming Dynasty finally became a free man in legal theory, and the country that the people of the Ming Dynasty wanted to be loyal to had not been officially annotated in the form of a law, and was just an abstract political term.

However, for Wen Tiren at this time, he was not so concerned about this issue. As the third chief assistant of the Chongzhen Dynasty of the Great Ming Dynasty, he is now busy taking over the central power of the country and beginning to purge Qian Qianyi of the influence left in the center.

As the first assistant of the Chongzhen Dynasty, Wen Tiren is undoubtedly lucky. The main work of Huang Liji, the first assistant of the Chongzhen Dynasty, was to continue to open a big hole in the old political system of the Ming Dynasty and establish the foundation for the reform of the Chongzhen Dynasty after the suppression of the local gentry by the eunuch party of the Tianqi Dynasty.

Huang Liji's work was actually extremely unflattering, so after serving as the first assistant, he retired and went home amid the shouting and scolding of the central government and the local gentry. Although Huang Liji's son and protégé were protected by the emperor, Huang Liji himself still became a traitor in the mouth of the people in the market, and almost became a figure comparable to Yan Song.

As for Qian Qianyi, the second chief assistant of the Chongzhen Dynasty, he was pushed to this position by the emperor because of his soft temperament, but he only used the prestige of his new Donglin Party leader to reconcile the differences among officials within the imperial court, continue to implement reforms, and stabilize the local gentry.

Qian Qianyi's performance in the past ten years has probably met the emperor's requirements, but he has also almost lost his reputation. As the first assistant, he failed to protect the interests of the Jiangnan gentry represented by the former Donglin Party, and not only did he continue to suppress the gentry during his tenure, but the most important thing was the continuous drought in the last three years of his term, which made Qian Qianyi's voice scolded among the people not much less than Huang Li.

As for Wen Tiren, who succeeded Qian Qianyi after the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, not long after taking office, the drought in the north began to ease. In particular, because of the introduction of potatoes and corn in the areas north of the Yellow River, and the continuous outflow of the population in the region, the grain production in Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia and other places finally appeared in a year of balance.

The drought in Henan, Shandong, Anhui and other places is far less serious than in the previous two years. In addition, the organization of overseas grain production, purchase, and transportation has gradually matured, so that the people in the disaster areas this year have finally stopped suffering large-scale deaths, and the high grain prices in various places have also begun to fall somewhat.

After the Spring Festival of the 15th year of Chongzhen, the good news that the epidemic had been brought under control came from the areas where the plague broke out last year in several counties in southern Hebei. All of a sudden, the good news continued to come to the capital, and even the reputation of Wen Tiren with the people was excellent.

Even Wen Tiren heard that some people have begun to advocate that the sages are out and the evil is far away, and the court has finally begun to clean up the source, so the disaster will gradually go away, and then the Ming Dynasty will finally embark on the right path.

Wen Tiren was a little flustered after hearing this, but some people were extremely annoyed by the rumors. For example, the former head assistant Qian Qianyi, it is said that he smashed his favorite tea cup at home.

However, Wen Tiren felt comfortable in his heart, but he also did not dare to ignore it. If it weren't for Cui Chengxiu and Feng Quan being boycotted by the old and new Donglin Party members, and Qian Qianyi's protégé Qu Shiyun lacked support from within the party, it would be really difficult for the position of first assistant to fall on his head.

Although Chongzhen finally reached an agreement with Qian Qianyi to let Qu Shiyun take over as the governor of Liangguang in exchange for Qian Qianyi's support for Wen Tiren's ascension, he also had to give up the right to recommend the secretary of the ministry, and let the emperor directly promote the Nanjing Ministry of Rites Shangshu Dynasty to hire him to take his position.

Wen Tiren felt that he had made rapid progress in the Chongzhen Dynasty, from a middle-level official to the secretary of the ministry, and now he has taken over the position of first assistant. But compared with the dynasty, it is really not worth mentioning. The starting point is just a professor, but within three or four years, he was mentioned to the position of the secretary of the Ministry of Rites, if it weren't for the fact that he was a little older, it is estimated that he would have the opportunity to sit in the seat of the first assistant.

However, even if the other party was promoted so quickly, the people in the court did not dare to accuse this new official of being a lucky person. Because standing behind Wang Chao Ping was a fledgling school of the Two Lakes School. In the past three or four years, the squires of the two lakes have supported the grain gap of the imperial court at any cost, and now they have finally received a reward, and the gentry of the two lakes, with the oblique support of the emperor, are rapidly squeezing out the privileges that originally belonged to the gentry of Jiangnan.

As the most outstanding politician in the Ming Dynasty, Wen Tiren quickly smelled that the two sides were trading privately. At the same time as the rise of the gentry in the two lakes, it was also the beginning of the local support of Hunan and Hubei universities for Yenching University and the call for reform of the imperial examination system.

The state-run school system is gradually replacing the private education of private schools and seowons, and the words that the emperor used to talk about in the past, that primary and secondary schools are just used to educate ordinary people to read and write, and that government schools and academies that cultivate talents for the country are not the same thing, are now gradually no longer heard.

On the contrary, a certain figure who had just been pardoned by the emperor and was hired as a professor at Yenching University after returning from overseas began to advocate that the master had no class of education, and that the status of scholars taught by government schools and academies was not higher than that of students who graduated from schools. In addition, some teachers in government schools and academies are not only shallow, but some people don't even understand the scriptures, so they rely on the relationship between their protégés and classmates to mix in the government schools and academies and mislead people's children. There are also some people who are even less of character, not only oppressing the good at home, but even slandering the government in their teaching, so as to mislead the scholars of the academy to criticize the government.

The former leader of the Restoration Society shouted in Shilin, first, that the imperial court should impose stricter control over private education, so as to prevent the academy from becoming a base camp for rebels; The second is to require the teaching of quotations and anthologies of the emperors of the Ming Dynasty in the private school - academy approved by the imperial court, so that the readers of the Ming Dynasty can understand the worries of the emperors of the Ming Dynasty for the country and the people.

For the 180-degree change after the former leader of the Restoration Society returned to China, the northern and southern Shilin were silent for a while, but their momentum was like cooking oil on fire, and it quickly spread from the capital to the local area.

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