After a few dinners, many people in Mincheng knew the news that Chen Jian was about to withdraw from Nanyang Trading Company. But the controlled tabloids only said that the system was bad, but did not stimulate the nerves of the small citizens who had invested in the shares with sharp moral criticism, and then diverted most people's attention from an accident in a child labor factory in the upper reaches of the Min River.

After another banquet, Jian Chen said goodbye to the rest of the people and rode alone on horseback to wander the streets of Mincheng at night.

Many people greeted him on the road, and Jian Chen also returned the salute one by one. The beggars, the children who came out to steal, the prostitutes who waited for the rich sailors near the docks, the somewhat thick smell of soot wafting through the streets, and the stench of excrement wafting from the river made up the unique street scenery and smell of this era.

Societies are being divided, but simple antagonisms have not yet formed. Everything that remains of the old era is intertwined with the contradictions of the new era and becomes intricate.

The introduction of large hydraulic workshops and the division of labor system has given women and children the opportunity to participate in some jobs in which men are dominant. A large number of children in Linjun were sent to workshops near Mincheng, where they were no longer apprentices, but the cheapest factory workers.

Child labour is always the cheapest, and they can afford lower wages than both male and female workers for a bite to eat, which, combined with children's nimble fingers and excellent learning abilities, allows them to master factory work faster than adults.

Habits such as alcoholism, which have been developed by adult workers and tormented by life, are the great enemies of the factory-based workshops, and child laborers do not have a habit of this for the time being. The middlemen involved in child labor trafficking have also made a fortune, and now the cotton spinning industry has been replaced by water-powered machinery on a large scale, and is in a stage of rapid development, when some child labor is most needed.

Some male hired workers, who had been reduced from small producers to bankruptcy, were led by people who believed that child labor and women had taken their jobs, so they were even more nostalgic for the patriarchal and guild systems of the old days, and were full of curses for all this.

Indeed, when the guilds existed, there was also a lot of oppression, exploitation, and oppression. But at that time there was at least hope for the small producers—the hope that one day they would become the guild masters and put on the heads of others, but now there is no hope of that.

It dawned on them that in the eyes of the workshop owners, there was not much difference between men and women and children, the only difference was which was more economical. If you want to become a master, you can only become a workshop owner, and there is no longer a chance to climb up the hierarchy step by step, but the opportunity to become a workshop owner is too difficult for a hired worker who eats, drinks and lodging after paying a little salary.

Gender, age, these things that should not have torn apart the race, began to tear apart all the perfect systems of patriarchy, guild and patriarchy, which were originally harmonious and beautiful. But they have yet to recognize another unified identity hidden behind all this tearing.

In the same way, the rapid development of science and technology has led to step-by-step development, which has magnified the various contradictions in the transition period, or just made the road that should have been completed in decades faster in ten years.

Life in the countryside was much higher than that of most of the hired workers in the cities. This is true, because all the yeoman farmers who could not survive in the countryside have moved to the cities, and the amount of land they still have in the countryside is enough to make them live a better life than urban workers.

The cities began to become crowded, the price of hired labor became lower and lower, and more and more people needed relief, and new peasants who came from the countryside and were forced to give up their happy wives and children became members of the city.

They have a lot of options, especially if they can get on the ship to the Great Wilderness City to emigrate that would be the best, as for the rest of the place...... The construction of the colony is far from being as easy as thought, without the base, the mortality rate of the first batch is more than fifty percent, and most of the ships that can go to the Great Wilderness City are participating in trade, even if they go to whaling, they are more profitable than this, but these homeless people who go to the city are always impossible to swim to the Great Wilderness City, and there are only two fleets that go to the Great Wilderness City every year, and they are overcrowded.

According to the law of "Heavenly Dao", the newly introduced relief method believes that it is correct not to provide relief, and even if there is relief, these people must be forced to work, and at the same time, men and women must be separated: according to the laws of the economy, relief is meaningless, and will only create more widespread poverty, so it is better not to give relief to die early and vacate the place as soon as possible, to achieve a balance between supply and demand, and a perfect balance can ensure that the life of the bottom is not very bad, otherwise the wages will be lower and lower.

Child labourers and single women or single men work in the workshops at lower wages, and those who have families migrated from the countryside to the cities have to accept the harsh fate of working on the plantations.

Min County has a relevant decree that when choosing slaves and Chinese freelancers on the plantation, the Chinese freelancers have priority, and the minimum wage is also stipulated. But for these displaced people who don't want that terrible handout, the law is a piece of, they fear that the minimum wage will be denied, and they understand that such restraints are meaningless, and will only make the plantation owners choose slaves and take their jobs. So they chose to sign a contract in secret: they worked for six years, did not pay a penny, and after six years, they gave a small piece of rice field near a large plantation, and used a form of semi-patriarchal and semi-hired labor to meet the labor needs of busy times, forming a semi-patriarchal relationship of nominal freedom but in fact dependence.

All this dooms this group of people to be the generation that has been abandoned in this change and transformation: they still retain the leisurely leisure of the era of small handicrafts, and they are not as good as the child laborers and the new generation of urban undergraduates who have adapted to the strict factory system. They have reached adulthood and have lost the opportunity to choose again, except for nostalgia for the past, there is only a clear, visible, and no more than ten years of service life, and in less than ten years this group of people will basically die.

This or that darkness, fragmentation and gore, was obscured by the seemingly bustling night and the canopy of the sky that shrouded Mincheng. The darkness of the newspapers that Chen Jian has heard or read in the past few days will not be clearly manifested in the lights of thousands of homes.

the glow of oil lamps from glass, mulberry or yellow paper windows; a bustling night market near the pier; The drunken citizens who have made a fortune in the times have taken a step forward instead of taking a step back; New style houses with masonry and bamboo and concrete structures...... All these are manifested at this time and this night, and it is announced that Mincheng is the most vibrant, prosperous, vibrant and future city at this time, and a city at the forefront of the times that is the most promising to become the first international city in the future.

And those divisions and gore are not what can be displayed at this time.

In front of the horse, a carriage with a glass kerosene lantern to block the wind rumbled past and moved out of the way of Chen Jianjian as a sign of respect. Kerosene lamps became a must-have for horse-drawn carriages traveling at night, and delicate lanterns with small mirrors could illuminate the long road ahead.

Taverns and teahouses, or cocoa and coffee brought from the southern trade, became a regular nighttime pastime. The people inside were discussing the price of tomorrow's goods, betting on whether a cargo ship would sink with silver coins, discussing some news in the newspapers, and arguing about what was reasonable and what was not.

Outside the theater, there is a lot of traffic, and a new scene is being staged that reflects the era of seafaring, fortune, profit, betrayal, and the like. Those who have seen the play are waiting for the new articles of critics or critics to appear in the tabloids tomorrow, or to discuss that the heroine of the new play will become a new flower at the important banquets in the future.

I don't know which speculator or smuggler made any windfall, setting off fireworks in the night sky, and those well-dressed men and women sat by the river and looked up at the sky, muttering or saying goodbye before going to sea to seek wealth.

The child selling white phosphorus matches stopped in front of a stopped carriage and begged the people in the carriage to buy a box of matches, and the people in the carriage were in a good mood about tonight, and kindly threw out a dozen coppers from it, even if they did not smoke, they could not do without the pity of the successful.

A rich kid who deliberately wears tattered clothes, leads a beautiful girl, deliberately goes to some of the places that are most likely to attract white eyes, and then takes out a large exchange note from the bank to make those small business operators tremble, making the woman laugh, and the man scolds a few words like snobbery - times have changed, and the people who deserve to be respected are no longer the same people who everyone recognized ten years ago.

In several well-known debate centers and speeches of civic politicians, many people listened quietly to the preaching of some people, and from time to time let out bursts of applause. The original worldview was perfected, and the personified heaven and earth were completely stripped away, leaving only the so-called way of heaven and earth. The foundation of new morality, law, and rights shaped by this worldview is also pervasive like a plague: heaven and earth have no personality, heaven is nature, nature is rights, and labor creates value...... All kinds of ideas of new morality, new ethical system, new values, and new ownership, which have been freed from the world of personality, have begun to be self-consistent, and the new bourgeoisie has begun to prepare for the rationality of their governance and wealth, and the cornerstone of the so-called natural rights is precisely to transform the mysterious way of heaven into measurable and summarized rules, and to make it lose the possibility of mystery and personification. The cornerstone has changed, what was right in the past has become wrong, and what has been wrong in the past has become right.

This is the Mincheng that can be seen by the eyes and at this moment, not the Mincheng hidden in newspapers, documents or notes.

Chen Jian didn't know whether to praise or sigh, but he had to admit that Mincheng at this time was the dream city of the entire world's capital holders at this time.

The canal, which connected the mining area and was repaired for several years, seemed to be of little significance at the time, and finally began to work at this time; the Min River, where raw materials are abundant and easy to transport upstream; the port of the vast market in the south; the inland sea of talent flow in the north; the county's growing education and ongoing planned research and development of skilled craftsmen; The fact that the change in the world outlook of the ideological revolution has taken shape......

So a city that took the lead in putting aside all kinds of warmth and enthusiasm and romance in the era of the patriarchal guild was the most exploitative and efficient, a city that developed the fastest and most "normal" outside the great wilderness city or Wangbei City in addition to the times against the times, and a city that took the lead in the best and worst times, so that its beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, good and evil were displayed in front of everyone without shyness or concealment.

Or for heaven in the eyes, or for hell in the eyes, it doesn't care.