Xiaotian's fold was handed over, and as soon as Jiajing looked at it, he was shocked. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 info's face changed greatly, and he read it several times in a row, and after putting it down, his eyes flashed, and he looked at Xiaotian.

Xiaotian calmly faced each other, and after a while, Jiajing fell into deep thought, thought for a while, took it out and looked at it, thought for a while, and then took it out to take a look. There was a very rare contemplative and solemn look on his face.

After a while, Jiajing spoke: "Take it to Yan Ge Lao to see"

Huang Jin hurriedly stepped forward and respectfully folded the song to Yan Song, but Yan Song's reaction was bigger than Jiajing's, and he looked like he stood up at first sight, and his old appearance was swept away. I read it several times in a serious way before I put down the recital and closed my eyes and pondered.

Jiajing said: "Xu Ge Lao also take a look"

Xu Jie respectfully took it from Yan Song's hand, only glanced at it, and his reaction was similar to Yan Song's.

Jiajing said again: "Let's take a look, there are no outsiders in the house." ”

Everyone has long been curious, what kind of twists and turns can shock Jiajing, Yan Song, and Xu Jie, and circulate them one by one.

At this glance, everyone's expressions are similar, and they are not much better.

It turned out that Xiaotian's twists and turns mentioned only one group throughout the article: clan relatives.

This is a letter to the clan relatives, just like a large bomb dropped on the calm lake, blowing up half of the lake at once, it is definitely an earth-shattering shock.

The decline of the Ming Empire is undoubtedly the product of a combination of reasons, and it is difficult to say which one is the most important. Clan relatives, natural disasters, population pressure, land annexation, the unreasonable system of guards, party disputes in the imperial court, the emperor's inaction, Jin merchants and bandits, and the Tartars are too strong, all of which are mountains that press on the head of the Ming Dynasty.

But there is no doubt that the huge number of clan relatives is definitely one of the most important of these mountains.

When the Ming Dynasty was founded, Zhu Yuanzhang gave great power to each of his sons, and as a result, Zhu Di rebelled and robbed his nephew of the throne. After Zhu Di succeeded in usurping the throne, he used a series of means to cut the feudal domain and take back the military power of the feudal king, but these tumors still existed.

For fear of their rebellion, the clansmen of the Ming Dynasty were strictly restricted by the imperial court, but their lives were very good, and they consumed a large amount of national funds of the imperial court every year, becoming a veritable parasite.

These princes usually have nothing to do, and they dare not reach out for national affairs, and they have no other hobbies except giving birth or giving birth every day. By the time of Jiajing, there were more than 200,000 moths in this group.

After all, the emperor has only one son who can be the emperor, and his other sons, of course, will be crowned princes, and the prince's hereditary sons will be knights, and the other sons are all county kings. The eldest son of the king of the county is a knight, and the other sons want to be crowned the general of the town country. Further down, the sons of the generals of Zhenguo should be named the generals of the auxiliary state, the sons of the generals of the auxiliary countries should be the generals of Fengguo, and the sons of the generals of the Fengguo should be the lieutenants of the Zhenguo, so that they have been passed down from generation to generation, and the parasites in the clan that are fed by the state treasury can be said to have increased geometrically, and the faster they increased later.

The fixed salary of the prince, i.e., Lu rice, was 10,000 koku per year, 2,000 koku for the prince of the county, 1,000 koku for the general of Zhenguo, and 800 koku for the general of the auxiliary state. There are even regulations on the amount of other types of titles, and the accumulation is an astronomical amount in itself. In addition, there are various rewards that vary from year to year, sometimes even more than a fixed salary.

Yushi Lin Run once wrote to Jiajing: The food supplied by the world to the capital is four million stones per year, but the food consumed by the royal palaces is eight million stones per year. Specifically, Shanxi Province, an important military town, stores 1.9 million stone of grain every year, but the local royal government consumes more than 3 million stone of grain. Henan Province has 940,000 stone of grain, but the local vassal kings consume more than 1.9 million grains. In other words, the taxes and grain of the whole country added up to the mouth of the vassal king.

In addition, the vassal kings have other incomes, they are relatives of the emperor, and they take more money than their salaries, and civil servants still have to fish.

The most common way for clansmen to accumulate wealth is land.

There are several tricks to encroach on people's land, and there are two common ones, one is fraud, that is, deliberately taking a fancy to the good land, colluding with the government to identify it as wasteland, seeking the court's gift, and then forcibly occupying it. The other is called "contribution", which means that many small people who cannot afford to pay taxes voluntarily put their fields in the name of the vassal king in order to avoid taxes.

In addition, before the year of the famine, it was the time when these rice worms acted, and even they sometimes artificially created famines, such as King An, who had dealt with Xiaotian.

In this way, in the Jiajing Dynasty, land annexation has become more and more intense, the rich have no place to stand and the poor have no place to stand, this is not an exaggeration, in fact, when the peasants revolted at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the first to bear the brunt of these clansmen, a large part of these people, are forced by these clansmen.

Ironically, these clansmen like to keep their food wealth in their own homes on weekdays, and after the peasant uprising, they were the first to kill, and all this grain and wealth became the military salary of the peasant army. It is ironic that these descendants of the Zhu family made indelible contributions to the victory of the peasant uprising.

In addition, these vassal kings do not have to pay taxes to the court after occupying the land, and the whole world belongs to the Zhu family. This is also the reason why the finances of the Ming Dynasty are getting worse and worse, to be honest, officials are greedy for ink, but in fact, they can't be greedy.

Liang Cai, the head of the household, once raised the question of the vassal king with Jiajing and put forward an astonishing prophecy; The people's taxes and grain were limited, and the vassal kings multiplied endlessly.

The more the vassal kings are born, the Ming Dynasty is overwhelmed, and if it is not reformed, even if Xiaotian colonizes the whole world, the Ming Dynasty will be eaten by them sooner or later, this is not an exaggeration, according to historical records, in the year of the Apocalypse, there were more than 600,000 relatives in the Ming Dynasty. If the Ming Dynasty does not die, I am afraid that it will soon be able to give birth to more than one million.

Xiaotian is also drunk, there are 200,000 Tartar men, women and children, and 600,000 Emperor Damingguang, which can allow them to occupy our great mountains and rivers.

Therefore, if the Ming Dynasty wants to develop, the problem of vassal kings is a problem that must be solved.

In fact, Jiajing has long attached importance to this issue, and his skills are quite clever, but after all, he himself is also a vassal king, and it is not easy to clean up the vassal king himself, but he paved an extremely smooth road for his son.

Of course, it is only the end of Jiajing's thirty-third year, and Jiajing has no idea of making a move against the vassal king, but one thing is certain, the problem of the vassal king is the cancer of the Ming Dynasty, and if the vassal king does not change, the Ming Dynasty will die sooner or later, which is already the consensus of people of insight in the dynasty.

It's just that it's not easy to move this piece. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of clan relatives, and it is nothing for these people to take out one alone, but if these hundreds of thousands of clan relatives are united, it is not impossible to turn the court upside down.

In addition, Jiajing himself was also a vassal king, and his clan was reformed, which was very embarrassing in the Jiajing Dynasty.

The traditional way to restrain the vassal king is nothing more than two ways.

One is a whip law, which in layman's terms means that the vassal king, like the common people, also pays taxes to the state when he farms. This policy was barely implemented in Zhang Juzheng's hands, but Zhang Juzheng was also a political death after his death.

The second is to limit the number of vassal kings, and if you are ruthless, you can stipulate that except for the concubines, the rest of the concubines are self-reliant. It is not easy to do this article, many people in the Ming Dynasty have proposed it, but it has never been implemented.

Neither of these two is an easy task. Therefore, although everyone knew the question of the vassal king, no one dared to ask it indiscriminately, and it was not necessarily useful to mention it.

But Xiaotian found another way and proposed a third way, going to sea. (To be continued.) )