Since Zhu Youzhen's policy of allowing officers and soldiers of the Guards to participate in the imperial examination, the traditional form of the imperial examination system that only cultivates scholars and scholars has been attacked by new scholars with both civil and military skills and mixed knowledge.

Among some of the officers and students trained by the Daming Army Military Academy and the Guards Army-level Academy, there will be people who are more interested in politics, and these people will be reported to the local government to participate in the work by the various armies and the Ming Army Military Academy, but they will still hold military positions in the army.

This means that the officers and soldiers of the Ming Guards themselves are already the class of scholars, and they have also become the ruling class of this empire.

Bao Shuo was just one of them, defining himself as a neo-Confucian scholar who accepted both the Confucian classics and Zhu Youzhen's theories of sacred learning, and as soon as he took over the post of county magistrate of Wuqiao County, he began to exercise his control over Wuqiao County according to the knowledge of political economy he had learned in the military academy of the Guards and the ethical knowledge he had unearthed in the Confucian classics.

The first thing Bao Shuo did was to set up an inspection team based on the soldiers of the Guards to which he belonged.

A unit at the corps level of the Guards Corps has its own officers and men directly under it.

Although Bao Shuo is the county commander of Wuqiao County, he also has his own military rank, rank and rank of lieutenant, so he also has his own soldiers.

Bao Shuo took his own soldiers as the captains of each inspection team, recruited local loyal people to set up an inspection team, and divided troops to manage the security of various sub-districts in Wuqiao County, so as to achieve the purpose of stabilizing order.

After all, after the Guards eliminated a large number of gentry classes, it also led to the chaos of the entire ruling order in Wuqiao County, and some bandits and lawbreakers also began to make trouble, and even some street gangsters also increased, taking the robbery of the rich as a righteous thing.

Therefore, the first thing Bao Shuo did when he came to Wuqiao County was to restore the ruling order, and then to unify the distribution of the means of production and stabilize prices.

The economic war of the Ming Dynasty against the Manchus has been going on.

A large number of silver dollars were printed and flowed into the northern regions ruled by the Manchus, but the Manchu government did not know that the reserves of gold should cope with the monetary impact of the Ming Dynasty, and the Manchus launched two wars to the south to conquer the Ming Dynasty, which made the inflation in the north very strong, and the gentry and wealthy families were hoarding, making the prices in the north ridiculously high.

In particular, the price of food and salt, which are most related to people's livelihood.

According to Jin Yiwei's report, one hundred silver dollars can buy one stone of rice in the northern region, while the same one hundred silver dollars can already buy one hundred stone rice in the southern region.

The people of the whole north could only buy rice with large bags of silver dollars to exchange for rice or silver.

The government no longer trusts the silver dollar and only accepts silver, which makes the phenomenon of expensive money in the entire northern region more and more serious, the life of the people at the bottom is becoming more and more difficult, and the social contradictions are becoming more and more acute.

Therefore, when the Guards retaliated against the gentry in Wuqiao County, the common people of Wuqiao County did not have much sympathy for the gentry, because the contradiction had indeed intensified to the point that they would rebel even if the Guards did not appear.

But Bao Shuo ruled here for the Ming Dynasty, so if he wanted to re-establish a long-term and stable ruling order, he had to reduce this price and restore the political and economic order of the entire Wuqiao County.

This is not a problem for Bao Shuo, who has received a new academic education, and there is a set of exemplary processes in the field of Daming administration.

First of all, after the establishment of an inspection team to maintain law and order, Bao Shuo began to fulfill the basic means of production such as grain, cloth, silver, and silver dollars that the guards had hoarded from the gentry families as promised, and distributed them to the servants and maids of the gentry families according to the specifications he had set.

At the same time, the land was distributed to the tenant farmers, and the remaining large quantities of grain, cloth, houses, antiques, etc., were sold at low prices, so as to achieve the purpose of recovering a large number of silver dollars.

At this time, Bao Shuo personally selected a student from the Ming Central Bank system to be responsible for the establishment of a county-level branch of the Central Bank in Wuqiao County, and began to recover a large number of silver dollars through savings business.

The people of Wuqiao County did not trust the monetary value of the silver dollar very much, and after obtaining the basic means of production, there was no need to conduct currency trade, so after seeing that they could get interest by depositing it in the bank, they thought that it would be better to put it in the bank than to put it at home, and there were also those who did not trust the bank and only hid it at home.

But either way, the hot money in the market cooled down, the amount of money in circulation declined, the total wealth of economic activities and the total wealth of money circulation began to tend to balance, prices also fell, and people's hearts were stabilized.

Fundamentally, because the Guards distributed the interests of the gentry to the common people, social contradictions were reduced, and the decline in prices was only an economic manifestation.

The recovered silver dollars were shipped back to Nanjing or destroyed, but more often were planned by the Ming Dynasty to be put into the Manchu ruled areas that had not yet been occupied, thus leading to such a phenomenon in the Manchu occupation areas, no matter how high your prices were, there were always local tyrants who could buy back things that you had raised ten times the price for.

The Manchu government was even more powerless for such an economic Northern Expedition than the military Northern Expedition of the Guards and the political Northern Expedition, but Bao Shuo, a young Ming official with little experience in officialdom, could solve such a problem perfectly as soon as he arrived, and gave the people the most direct feeling that the Ming Dynasty was naturally better than the Manchu Dynasty, and even the Ming government was more trustworthy than the Manchu government.

In the Manchu occupation area, a banknote with a denomination of 1,000 silver dollars could not be trusted by the people, but in Wuqiao County, which was not long after the Ming occupation, Bao Shuo only wrote a piece of paper with a number at will to facilitate the trade between the government and the people, and the people believed that with such paper they could exchange for items of his due value.

After stabilizing public order and economic order, Bao Shuo began to try Lou Sheng and other Qing court officials.

All the dissatisfaction of the northern people against the ruling class was concentrated on Lou Sheng and other Manchu officials, so Bao Shuo's punishment of these people was also a stabilizer of political hearts.

Lou Sheng thought that Bao Shuo would persuade him to surrender and even take him in, but he didn't expect Bao Shuo to be sent to the trial table, and he was judged by all the people of Wuqiao County, which made Lou Sheng very devastated, but what made him even more devastated was that he would not think that he would be executed by Ling Chi.

The changes brought about by the occupation of Wuqiao County by the Ming Guards meant that the Northern Expedition was no longer what Zhang Yanghao called "Xing, the people suffered; Death, the people suffer", from this moment on, the guards of the Northern Expedition will rescue the people of a city every time they regain it.

(End of chapter)