After a few days, these recruits gradually became familiar with life in the barracks, and began to carry out military skills training according to the plan under the leadership of the instructors.

Due to the lack of suitable candidates found at present, and the shelf of the soldiers' committee could not be set up for the time being, Xia Lin also temporarily put down the burden here, returned to the industrial park and began to prepare for the bidding of the road repair plan.

During the time when he was busy with the new army, the princess Dorothea met with many chamber of commerce stewards, and sent her servants to the imperial capital to conduct many investigations, and finally came to a conclusion:

That is, there is a considerable dissatisfaction with the weights and measures of the empire among the various groups of the empire, but this dissatisfaction is masked in custom and tradition.

To this end, the Empress Dorothea summoned the Earl of Karen, the Earl of Stewart, and the Viscount Hart, and explained to them her determination to promote the discussion of the metric units that Charling had mentioned.

The three Speakers who were originally skeptical and hesitant about this weights and measures, seeing the determination of the Empress and Xia Lin, as well as the examples of losses caused by the mistakes of the Imperial Weights and Measures, which were specially collected by the Empress Dorosia from various chambers of commerce, finally agreed to the implementation of this council within the Alliance.

So at the latest meeting of the Alliance, Queen Dorosia and the other three Speakers dropped bombshells one after another.

The promotion of the alliance metric unit and the establishment of a supporting alliance of the metric unit promotion institute, the cement production technology of the Xinglan Industrial Park was officially included in the list of patent rights of the alliance, the establishment of the alliance talent evaluation center, the members of the alliance chamber of commerce are required to register the skills of the craftsmen belonging to their chamber of commerce, and the technology of the steelmaking plant in the Xinglan Industrial Park is open to the royal family separately, etc., which suddenly makes the alliance float.

After the pros and cons of Dorothea's Princess, and the support of the other three speakers, the Eucalyptus for the Promotion of the Metric Units of the Union was finally passed by a vote of 224 to 152, of which the negative votes were basically voted by some small nobles and small chambers of commerce.

The promotion of metric units is too damaging to the sellers of their industrial terminals, because they have to deal with customers frequently, which means that in the future, their shops will have to mark the selling price of metric units separately, and at the same time, they will need to prepare two sets of bookkeeping.

However, with the prestige accumulated by the four speakers during this period and the temporary proposal for subsidies for metric units, this proposal was passed, and now they can only hope that the alliance can put more effort into the promotion of metric units and change this situation as soon as possible.

Although many member chambers of commerce are salivating over the steelworks' unique steelmaking technology, since the royal family has taken a fancy to this technology, and the princess Dorosia has proposed some plans to compensate for the losses of the alliance, they can only pinch their noses and accept it.

The licensing of cement, which should have been a competitive competition, was not a problem, and the princess Dorothea directly proposed the criteria of the Chamber of Commerce that could be authorized:

That is, if you can invest more than 200 gold lunt in working capital to establish a cement plant, and participate in the bidding of the imperial capital road repair plan, and undertake at least one road repair and reconstruction task, then you can directly obtain the authorization of the cement production process at the patent fee of 1 copper biss per heavy weight.

The reason for this threshold is that Charlin had explained to Dorothea that factories such as cement factories were very polluting, so they had to be carefully chosen to build their factories.

Although there are many tributaries of the Sein, there are not many suitable places like this, and after discussing with the three speakers, the princess Dorosia decided to select a suitable chamber of commerce by setting the requirements for the size of the investment.

Among them, the road repair plan will be carried out in the form of half of the bidder's capital and the other half in the form of loans from the Union Commercial Bank.

This can reduce the pressure on the chamber of commerce's capital turnover, and also allow the alliance to obtain the right to collect 50% of the road royalties for these roads, which is a win-win situation.

However, even after a screening, a full 56 member chambers of commerce in the financially strong business alliance have been authorized.

They immediately began to select a site for the construction of a factory building and a cement vertical kiln with the assistance of the First Construction Company of the Imperial Capital, and at the same time purchased a machining plant in the industrial park to produce ball mills, with the help of technicians sent by the cement factory in the industrial park

Workers are trained to familiarize themselves with the cement production process.

It is to be expected that in the future there will be many remote places in the lower reaches of the Seine that will be covered with smoke chimneys and cement dust in them.

But in this era, Xia Lin can't manage so much. According to his estimates, 500 kilometers of roads in the imperial capital need to be repaired in this huge road repair project.

Outside the city, the main road connecting Urgana to the Blue Lagoon Mountains, where important mineral materials are produced, and four important secondary roads add up to more than 800 kilometres in length.

With such a huge renovation plan, even the business alliance can only choose to undertake the most important and beneficial part of it, including the 37 roads in the imperial capital, with a total length of 214 kilometers, and the main road from the imperial capital to the Blue Lake Mountain, with a total length of 120 kilometers.

It is estimated that 150 tons of cement will be consumed for one kilometer of 3.5 concrete roads in the imperial capital, and 180 tons of cement will be consumed for one kilometer of 4.2 concrete roads on the main road of Blue Lake Mountain, and a total of almost 54,000 tons of cement will be required.

Even if all these cement plants were to be completed and reach the capacity of the cement plant in the Xinglan Industrial Park to produce five tons per day, it would take almost eight months of continuous production to meet the full demand.

In return, the New Leaf Chamber of Commerce was granted the right to purchase four iron mines, coal, sulphur and saltpeter mines that Count Stewart had previously promised.

Although the reserves of these mines located in the Blue Lake Mountain Range and other areas around the imperial capital are not large, and the average price of each mine is 650 gold lund, which is not cheap, Xia Lin still immediately sent the staff of the New Leaf Chamber of Commerce to negotiate with the alliance about related matters.

On February 11, the day of the bidding meeting of the Imperial Capital City Hall, a total of 60 chambers of commerce gathered in the conference hall of the city hall.

Above was the head of the Hurgana City Hall, Alrod Noll, who had not had much expectation for such a strange road repair plan handed down by the Administration Department, but when he saw the full number of chamber of commerce representatives in the council hall, including many of the heads of the big families in the imperial capital that he was familiar with, he naturally showed a look of surprise.

Of the 60 chamber of commerce representatives present, 56 chambers of commerce that have obtained cement production technology licenses were all present, and the remaining four were conservatives who came to check the situation.

In their opinion, even the power to be able to use the highway fee after completion is quite a thankless task.

After all, the cheapest stone on one side can only be bought for nearly two gold lundes, even if there is a stone mine under its name, the cost of mining and transporting it to the imperial capital will cost more than one gold lund, and then workers will have to be hired......

After a series of expenditures, it would cost at least three or four hundred gold lunets to build a road of one rand (1.2 km), and how long would it take to pay back the cost of one to five copper bis for a horse-drawn carriage just by relying on the convoy that traveled on the road every day? How long will it take to make a profit?

The reason why the conservatives are not opposed to this plan is also to see how these enlightened guys will complete this road repair plan that looks beautiful and in fact is unlikely to be built by the Chamber of Commerce.

It would be funny if the news of the tender meeting and the road repair plan were released, and no chamber of commerce would be willing to take it.

Emperor Plitt had high expectations for this plan, and if they messed up, the conservatives would have a reason to attack the enlightened at the court.

Originally, the conservative people were ready to see the jokes of the enlightened faction, but what they saw today was that the enlightened nobles actually came to the bidding meeting as representatives of the chamber of commerce, and talked to each other in a relaxed mood about which road they were going to bid for, and they didn't seem to care about the loss at all, which suddenly made the representatives of the four conservative chambers of commerce look at each other.

Could it be that these enlightened guys are crazy? I don't even know how to calculate the cost and profit?