When the time entered 1868, it was inevitable that the first month of January would be more noisy because of the budget.

Since the founding of the empire, every year in January of the Western calendar, before the Spring Festival of the lunar calendar, there will always be a big war for the budget during this period of time.

Over time, the capital has become an annual political drama in the empire, and at this time of year, the cabinet bosses and the military bosses will engage in various games, including the cabinet and the military competing for the proportion of military spending, the army and navy within the military and the Guards competing for the distribution of military spending, and the various departments on the cabinet side are also competing for their own funds.

However, this kind of contention was relatively fierce in the past few years, and in the past two years, it has been much more gentle, because after so many years, some traditions and rules will always be formed, for example, in the central budget, the proportion of military spending should be kept below 28 percent, and this is already the consensus of the cabinet, and even the military is forced to admit it.

In these military spending, the army and navy and the Guards, the army takes the big head, the navy takes the small head, and as for the Guards, the proportion is smaller, but the Guards are only three divisions in total, and they don't spend much military spending.

The allocation of administrative funds in the cabinet, the cabinet also has a roughly fixed distribution ratio, and the finance department that takes the most funds is taken, because the finance department has many staff, and it is also quite important, and the three major subordinate businesses can be said to support the overall economic development of the empire, namely taxation, customs, and finance.

The tax officers under the tax department of the Ministry of Finance are all over the country, and their tentacles extend to the towns and villages, and the number of employees is quite large.

In addition, the finance department is in addition to the regular tax personnel. The Ministry of Finance, together with the Department of Patrols, also heads a very special agency: the Tax Patrol Police.

The main function of the Tax Patrol Bureau is to crack down on tax evasion, in addition to cracking down on ordinary tax crimes.

Since the tax patrol police bureau can only patrol the police department can only have some overlap. Therefore, at the beginning of its establishment, the Patrol Police Department directly merged its own tax crime agency and the Tax Patrol Police Bureau. And this tax patrol police station is under the dual leadership of the finance department and the patrol police department.

Since it is a dual-leadership joint venture, the Ministry of Finance also bears part of the agency's expenses.

In addition to this Tax Patrol Bureau, there is actually another agency under the joint leadership of the Finance Department and the Patrol Department, which is the Maritime Patrol Bureau, which is mainly responsible for anti-sea smuggling and other maritime crimes, as well as maritime rescue missions.

In addition to ordinary officers, the Coast Patrol also has a large number of ships, and many of them are armed ships, and many of the merchant ships in these years are semi-armed, not to mention those smuggling ships. You can't stop these smuggling boats without a few cannons on them.

Because the empire is not good at setting up multiple maritime security agencies at the same time, when the Maritime Patrol Bureau was established, many of the river and coast patrol detachments under the Patrol Police Department were also included in the Maritime Patrol Bureau, and all the security tasks in the coastal waters belonged to the Maritime Patrol Bureau, and the main task of the bureau at present was to fight against sea smuggling.

In order to accomplish this important task, the Ministry of Finance has always been very averse to sea smuggling, because it will seriously affect the tax revenue of the customs, so the financial support of the Department has always been large.

Among them, there were only five wooden-hulled steam gunboats of more than 300 tons. Then those steam clippers of one or two hundred tons added up to a dozen, and there were even more of the other types of small boats.

Although these customs ships are small boats, those customs anti-smuggling ships of more than 100 tons are basically fully armed, and many of them are offshore gunboats decommissioned by the navy. The rest were also specially ordered steam fast gunboats.

The largest of them was the 560-ton Asuka, a rather bizarre offshore fast gunboat armed with a number of front-loading rifled guns. With sails and steam power, it is faster than the Zhenguang-class gunboats. Able to run ten knots, of course, compared to a full-fledged warship. The protection and firepower are too poor.

Most of the remaining small and medium-sized ships are converted from civilian vessels, but even so, the size and power of the customs anti-smuggling fleet actually exceed that of the navies of some small countries, such as Vietnam and Thailand, and the navies of Vietnam and Thailand will certainly not be able to defeat the imperial customs anti-smuggling fleet.

On the Japanese side, there were no naval ships on the Restoration faction, and although there were a few second-hand ships purchased from the Empire on the shogunate side, most of them were old, and although the tonnage was larger, it was estimated that they could not fight with the Empire's customs anti-smuggling fleet.

Although the ships of this Maritime Patrol Police Bureau do not have the name of any fleet, the establishment is the establishment of the previous river and sea patrol police, but there are still good people who call it: Customs Fleet!

Of course, with the current strength of the Imperial Navy in the western Pacific waters, it is not the turn of the so-called customs fleet to fight with the Imperial Navy.

Although the two law enforcement agencies, the Tax Patrol Bureau and the Maritime Patrol Bureau, are jointly led by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Patrol Police, the Patrol Department does not have much money every year.

Therefore, the annual administrative expenditure of the Ministry of Finance is a large amount.

In addition to the Ministry of Finance, the second largest expenditure is the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, which is responsible for all industrial and commercial development of the empire, and in order to support the industrial and commercial development of the empire, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce needs to invest a large amount of administrative funds every year.

Among the cabinet ministries, the Ministry of Education received the third largest amount of funding.

In order to cultivate and cultivate new talents, the empire invests a large amount of education funds every year, and many government-run schools across the country need to rely on the investment of education funds.

Taking Imperial University as an example, the Ministry of Education needs to give a subsidy of hundreds of thousands and less than 100,000 yuan every year, and there are more and more government-run schools in the empire, and the subsidy number of this fund is also getting larger and larger.

The huge financial pressure has forced the Ministry of Education to vigorously promote private schools over the years!

From the most ordinary primary schools, to higher primary schools, primary schools, and even to higher high schools, universities, and higher teachers, almost all levels of schools are encouraged to run private schools, and administrative support is given, for example, the Ministry of Education will recognize the academic certificates of those qualified private schools.

But even so. The annual education funding is also overwhelming.

After finance, industry and commerce, and education, it is a relatively large expense to encourage infrastructure construction such as agriculture, water conservancy, and roads.

The central budget of the empire is several hundred million. But after such a point, in fact, the central financial situation of the empire is still relatively tight every year. It has never been able to save tens of millions of taels in the treasury like the ancient feudal dynasties, and there will even be a certain fiscal deficit in some years.

However, the effect of spending such a huge amount of money every year is also obvious, and the development of education, industry and other aspects is quite rapid, laying a solid foundation for the industrial revolution that the empire is underway.

At the same time, the development of the industrial economy has brought more fiscal revenue, so that the government has more disposable funds. This creates a virtuous circle.

When the new year's budget was agreed, it was also the Spring Festival.

A few days before Chinese New Year's Eve, Lin Zhe buried himself in the office every day, focusing on many government affairs in order to welcome the Spring Festival holiday.

During the Chinese New Year, the empire will enter the traditional festivities, and in order to celebrate the festive season, three days of holiday will be arranged during the Spring Festival, of course. This official holiday is also limited to state employees only.

At the same time, the functioning of the ruling apparatus of the country will not stop because of the holidays, and there will be more or less people on duty in each department.

On Chinese New Year's Eve, in the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner in the palace. In addition to the original many concubines and children, Qi Lin also appeared with her son, although Qi Lin did not live in the palace. Instead, she lives in the Anhua Courtyard across the wall, but she is a titled concubine after all. is already an official member of the royal family, and she can naturally be seen at the dinner party on Chinese New Year's Eve.

The concubines and the princes and daughters were arranged at each table. And these two dozen people are all the royal members of the empire.

Unlike other dynasties, where there were as many royal family members as pigs and dogs, the royal family of the Chinese Empire was quite small, because Lin Zhe had no brothers, not even a single cousin.

Therefore, the only members of the royal family are Lin Zhe's mother and son, as well as his wife and children, so the most prominent family in the Chinese Empire is actually not many in number.

In order to control the number of members of the royal family, the royal family has a law that members of the royal family who are not more than three generations will be stripped of their royal status and become commoners.

That is, after A inherits the throne, A's brother and the second and third generations are still royal, but the fourth generation is not a royal family, but is converted to civil nationality.

After a woman marries, she will be abolished from the royal family and converted to civil status.

On the one hand, these measures maintained the noble status of the imperial family, and on the other hand, they also prevented the excessive number of royal families, which eventually caused the clan problems that plagued many feudal dynasties in ancient times.

Whether it is the hundreds of thousands of princes and grandsons of the Ming Dynasty, or the red and yellow belts of the Qing Dynasty, in fact, they have not effectively solved these problems.

Now Lin Zhema, his thinking is not the same as those traditional monarchs, he thinks that children and grandchildren have their own children and grandchildren, which is enough to ensure the glory and wealth of three generations, as for a hundred years later, let them fight together with ordinary people.

Of course, there were other reasons that prompted Lin Zhe to do this.

Others may not know, but Lin Zhe knows very well that the people in China may still gladly accept the monarchy and the aristocracy, but this will not be the case in a few decades.

In the twentieth century, there was a great explosion of nationalism and nationalism, and the rule of the empire would be in a very dangerous situation, and this danger would not be solved by building a huge army and navy, but would come from within.

This internal threat is not even a specific person, but a trend of thought!

From the beginning of the establishment of this empire, Lin Zhe actually began to prepare in all aspects, or to take precautions, and he would never allow the empire he had built to collapse in the sound of revolutionary guns.

This can be seen from the many measures implemented by the empire, such as the agricultural tax ladder system, which alleviated the land contradiction, and then formulated the aristocratic system, in which there were only annuity and ceremonial privileges, but no actual political and economic privileges, which greatly limited the number of members of the imperial family, both of which were determined to alleviate the natural dissatisfaction of the lower classes of the domestic people with the royal family and the aristocratic class.

In addition, to a certain extent, the national employee examination is also aimed at alleviating domestic contradictions, even though the main purpose of the national employee examination is to absorb talents to govern the country.

But at a deeper level, the purpose of the national employee examination is to recruit the best political talents from all over the country into the ruling class, so that they can become part of vested interests, so that they do not want to be dissatisfied, and then they will think wildly and finally embark on the road of rebellion.

The royal family eating the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner is naturally not as serious as an ordinary state banquet, it is just an ordinary family banquet.

Even the little princes, who are strictly disciplined on weekdays, are running around today, and Lin Xuan, the eldest brother, is even taking a few younger brothers and sisters to set off firecrackers next to him, and the rise of playing is that firecrackers are thrown around, which scared several young sisters to cry.

If Lin Zhe saw it on weekdays, he would definitely reprimand him with a straight face, as an elder brother, he would have to look like a brother and set an example for his younger brothers and sisters.

But today, Lin Zhe also smiled, and then hugged the frightened and crying fourth daughter Yi'an and comforted: "Don't be afraid, brothers are teasing you!" ”

Lin Yi'an was born to Concubine Qian Kang, only six years old this year, like her mother, her face is a little fat, and she looks very cute.

Just by the brothers threw firecrackers, it was a big cat, but the little girl cried fast, laughed fast, and soon her sister Zhi Xuan came over, saying that when she wanted to take her to see the lanterns, she immediately burst into tears and laughed, and then jumped up and down and followed Zhi Xuan, and when she left, she didn't forget to pull Lin Zhe's sleeve, and then wiped her snot clean......

Watching Zhi Xuan take her two younger sisters to the side, Chen Jing on the side was thoughtful, and finally raised her head after looking at Lin Zhe: "Your Majesty, time flies so fast, after this year, Zhi Xuan is already thirteen years old!" ”

Lin Zhe didn't react for a while when he heard Chen Jing suddenly say this, but when the emperor dealt with his courtiers every day, and most of those courtiers spoke in secret, over time, guessing other people's minds became Lin Zhe's strength, so when he suddenly heard Chen Jing talk about Zhi Xuan's age, he immediately understood Chen Jing's hidden meaning, that is, his eldest daughter is not small, and she should almost start to get married.

The age of marriage is relatively early, and the marriage law officially issued by the empire stipulates that men can marry at least 16 years old and women at 14 years old.

In addition, the Marriage Law advocates the freedom of marriage for the first time, and whether to marry or not needs to follow the wishes of both the man and the woman.

In addition, in the Han tradition, there is a tradition of engagement, although the law says that women must be at least 14 years old and men must be at least 16 years old to get married, but in fact, many people will make a marriage when they are young.

In the folk, girls generally start to think about marriage at the age of twelve if they are younger.

As a mother, Chen Jing is naturally concerned about the marriage of her eldest daughter, and it is always a good thing to pay attention to it early, so as not to be too anxious to find it in a few years. (To be continued.) )