By the time the New Year of 1916 arrived, the Irish army had crossed the military line that threatened to separate Belfast, and the British authorities and their armed forces were gradually withdrawing under the terms of the agreement. At least the coronation was not rushed to the occasion without adequate preparations - according to official sources from the Kingdom of Ireland, the coronation will take place on the last Saturday of February, if the National Cathedral in Limerick is completed as scheduled. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

On the first day of the new year, Natsuki was still in Berlin and attended the German royal family's garden celebrations, but he did not stay long in this gathering of princes and nobles, and then left for the local Irish expatriate chamber of commerce.

Upon the imminent arrival of the prospective king of the Kingdom of Ireland, the meeting place of the Chamber of Commerce had already been carefully decorated, and the Irish Chambers of Commerce in various parts of Germany, at the request of the Irish Foreign Service in Germany, had been notified of the arrival of representatives of the Irish Chambers of Commerce, which were nominally independent and scattered, but which were very closely connected with each other.

Due to the location of the Chamber of Commerce, which is not very convenient for transportation, and the German people who came to watch with curiosity, Xia Shu's special car easily passed through the crowd to reach the Chamber of Commerce.

The president waited in front of the door with a group of people, and saluted Natsuki from afar, and used the honorific title of the king in advance: "Sincerely welcome, noble majesty!" ”

From the eyes of the people around him, Natsuki felt the flattery and eagerness of the expatriate in a foreign land, and he calmly waved to everyone, and then walked up to the president. Before arriving at the Chamber of Commerce, Natsuki had already obtained detailed information about the expatriate chamber from the adjutant, whose president, Hee Daunte, ran a high-end restaurant in Berlin; Vice President Joe Berg, a partner at a large glassware factory; Secretary Samir Forrester, Wine Agent...... As a chamber of commerce, most of its members are engaged in industry or trade, with a few doctors, lawyers, and a few in the public sector, a profession composition that largely reflects the direction of the Irish diaspora in Berlin and even in Germany.

Here, with the exception of the seventy-year-old president Douent, who was born in Ireland, the other members of the Chamber of Commerce and the representatives of the Chamber of Commerce from other cities are basically second-generation Irish expatriates, who look like ordinary Berliners in their dress, words and deeds, and still give people a sense of humility and low-key even if they are very wealthy. They are fluent in German and presumably speak German for most occasions, and only use Gaelic in Ireland when attending chamber of commerce events, private parties, or when only family members are present......

"Hello, Your Excellency President, it's a pleasure to be here. Once upon a time, we were all Berliners, living in the same city every day, but never interacting with each other; Now we are all Irish, and although we no longer live in a city, we are connected by this magical bond of Ireland. Natsuki's seemingly ordinary words just rightly evoked the sense of national honor hidden in the hearts of the expatriate. In the past, the Irish were second-class citizens of the United Kingdom, they had no feelings for their nationality, they lived abroad, and they missed their homeland every night. Now that the Irish have their own country, the entire island of Ireland and the Irish people who have lived here for generations are part of it, giving the Irish expatriates living abroad a national spiritual sustenance.

Natsuki's intentions for the visit to the Expatriate Chamber of Commerce were not merely courteous. As Ireland emerged on the international stage as an independent state, the dilemma of weak foundation, religious antagonism, and many factions was something that the ruler of the country had to find a way to solve. To make Ireland as stable, prosperous and strong as possible, cultivating a sense of national honor and cohesion among all citizens is the most effective way to do so. Although the island of Ireland is small, with a small population base and a weak economic development, it has a particularly large expatriate due to the history of the Great Famine of the 19th century. Officially, between 1846 and 1856, more than 1.8 million Irish people left their homes to earn a living abroad. In this era, population means, on the one hand, the size of the domestic market and the driving force of economic development, and on the other hand, it is also an absolute factor in the number of soldiers. Including the Protestants in northern Ireland, Ireland's native population is now only about 4.3 million, only one-tenth of that of Britain and one-ninth of France, less than Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, Bulgaria, Greece and other small European countries, and only slightly more than Switzerland, Finland, Denmark and Norway.

Entering the Chamber of Commerce, Xia Shu talked openly and honestly with these elites who worked hard in the business world. Natsuki describes the earth-shaking changes that are taking place in the Kingdom of Ireland and gives them a blueprint for the construction of the country, making them feel that they are no longer rootless duckweed, and that no matter where they are, there is a positive country behind them that carries their dignity and allows them to proudly claim that they are Irish.

The prospective king, with his affable image and heartfelt language, quickly conquered the hearts of the Irish expatriate, who rushed to tell their story and their thoughts. During the Irish War of Independence, many of them donated money and materials to the Irish independence forces through various channels, and now that Ireland is in the stage of full implementation of infrastructure construction, these overseas travelers are willing to do their best to help their homeland.

When it comes to political stances, the expatriates invariably support the implementation of a constitutional monarchy in Ireland, which is certainly due to Xia Shu's personal visit, but the exposition of the expatriates also reflects the public psychology from one side - whether it is a monarchy republic or a democratic republic, as long as the country is stable and strong, and the people live and work in peace and contentment, even if there is some delay in efficiency and some corruption among officials, it is acceptable.

With regard to Ireland's international relations, only a few diasporas believe that permanent neutrality should be declared, while the rest are satisfied with the current German-Irish alliance, since German support has been crucial to Ireland's independence and its post-independence stability. Conversely, although Ireland had just reached a rapprochement with the British, peacefully reclaiming sovereignty over the Belfast region from the British, the diaspora was surprisingly unanimous in hating the British. Clearly, they had not forgotten the reason for their own expatriate, each of whom had relatives near or far who had died in the Great Famine exactly seventy years earlier, and the poverty caused by the British colonial policy of total plundering of Ireland was the root cause of that crisis, which had been almost entirely occupied by English landowners since the middle of the seventeenth century, most of whom lived in England and were concerned only with the export of grain and livestock, from which most of Ireland's agricultural income was exported. Due to the severe annexation of land in Ireland, most of the Irish peasants became tenant farmers of the English landed aristocracy, and the land they acquired was so small that they had to grow potatoes to support their families. In addition, after the annexation of Ireland to the United Kingdom, the originally prosperous Irish industry and commerce were hit by the British industrial products that could be freely imported and manufactured under better economic conditions. As a result, the Irish people were almost entirely dependent on the land and had no way out in industry, and the brutal colonial plunder caused extreme poverty among the peasants, and more than half of the people in Ireland depended on potatoes for their livelihood.

By the middle of the 19th century, a terrible oomycete that caused potato rot swept through Ireland, which caused a serious food crisis, but at that time, the tragedy of millions of people starving to death could and should have been avoided, knowing that Britain was at its peak in the Victorian period, and had completed the industrial revolution, and was recognized as the world's factory, leading the world trend in all aspects of colony, political system, economic development, etc., It is a vast colonial empire with nearly a quarter of the Earth's land mass and nearly a quarter of its population. However, in the face of the unprecedented famine in Ireland, the British government was indifferent to the life and death of the Irish people, and allowed the disaster to spread, the relief measures were both ineffective and extremely slow, and for the sake of ridiculous face, the British government arbitrarily blocked the humanitarian aid of other countries, a widely circulated example is that the Ottoman Sultan announced that he would send 10,000 pounds to the affected Irish farmers, but Queen Victoria asked him to donate only 1,000 pounds, on the grounds that she had donated 2,000 pounds.

Out of self-interest, Britain repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 during the Great Famine, which undermined the right of Irish grain to be freely imported into England, and caused Irish wheat to lose its monopoly position in the British market, which in turn undermined Ireland's agricultural economy. The British landlords in Ireland, since the repeal of the Corn Laws, ignored the famine in Ireland and mostly switched from wheat cultivation to animal husbandry, which greatly weakened the ability to resist famine, thus aggravating the development of famine to a considerable extent.

The British government's absurd performance during the Great Irish Famine did not diminish Britain's prestige and influence around the world, and for more than half a century, the empire continued to rise, reaching another peak in its colonial territory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For Ireland, the rift with England had reached a point where it could not be bridged, and the unusual demographic curve (the Irish population had plummeted from more than eight million to four million before the famine due to death and mass immigration) had caused a profound trauma to the nation as a whole, but this trauma had also allowed the Irish diaspora to remain as connected as possible, all of which gave post-famine Ireland a quality unlike any other European country, a rare quality that had been hardened and strengthened by suffering, It's called Ireland!

(End of chapter)