On the first day of May, Heifu once again stood in front of the simple inner gate of Blind Mountain, feeling a little complicated.
Perhaps he felt that he would definitely not be able to meet the household registration standard this year. After arriving in the village after the trial results, the village stingy man in Zhenshui Township simply ordered people to sweep away all the livestock and property that should be confiscated in Blind Mountain, and then set fire to it.
Just burn this Liju!
Anyway, you have to walk a long way to reach that place. Now that the structures are gone, the houses that remain serve as a lair for the desperate bandits.
This task, of course, fell to the local pavilion chief...
After revisiting the old place, everyone in Huyang Pavilion also felt a little emotional. This was the most dangerous case they had encountered since taking office. If Xiao Tao hadn't shot to death the person who incited the official to kill the officer in time, who knows what would have happened? Maybe he had been smashed.
It was reduced to a pulp, and when I think about it afterwards, I still have lingering fears.
After going in and walking around, they found that Liju, which once had a somewhat inhabited atmosphere, was now deserted. Sparrows had fallen on the stove, and yellow dogs who could not find their owners were running around. There was a mess everywhere.
Seeing this situation, Ji Ying was a little confused. When passing by a house, he remembered that when he first came to deliver a letter, he went in and asked for a sip of water. This family was kind to him.
When Ji Ying saw the tragic situation of the women who had been kidnapped and sold, he just wanted to kill everyone in the village. But after hearing the verdict, he realized that the more than ten people who were sentenced to death were certainly not worthy of pity, but there were more than a hundred people in the village.
Becoming prisoners together is shocking just listening to it.
Not to mention that there are still ten or twenty underage children who will become orphans in Yinguan...
So Ji Ying suddenly turned around and asked Heifu:
"Brother Heifu, is what we did this time right or wrong?"
…
"Is it worth sending two hundred people to jail just to save four people?"
When Ji Ying asked this question, several other people also raised their heads and looked over. It was obvious that they were also filled with doubts.
After Heifu pondered for a long time, he said: "The atrocities committed by one person against one person is a crime, and the atrocities committed by a hundred people against one person are also crimes. Judgments are made according to the law. It is impossible for the law not to punish everyone just because there are many people."
Most Confucians believe that human nature is inherently good, just like water flowing downwards. It is a natural thing. Even if someone has evil thoughts in his heart, he is forced by the situation. Only through morality and education can people go on the right path.
However, the fact is that even after more than two thousand years of education, things like infanticide and abduction have never stopped in remote places.
In order to solve problems that cannot be solved by moral education, Legalists took the opposite path, believing that human nature is inherently evil, and everything is caused by "love of benefits and evils". This kind of relationship exists between monarch and minister, father and son, and husband and wife.
For example, Han Feizi said sadly, "Parents treat their children as follows: when a boy is born, they congratulate each other, but when a girl is born, they kill her." This is a common phenomenon in this era. There are more boys than girls in Blind Mountain, which is why it is caused by this.
When parents give birth to children, they congratulate each other if they give birth to a boy, and if they give birth to a girl, they brutally kill her. Why? Because of interests, boys can carry on the family line and work in the fields, but girls have to grow up.
If you pay a dowry, your family won't have much food, and raising a daughter-in-law for someone else's family is not worth it.
In the eyes of Legalists, even biological parents and children care about interests like this, let alone ordinary people? Therefore, likes, dislikes, interests and interests are deeply embedded in human nature, and they can never be changed through acquired efforts!
So the Legalists simply gritted their teeth and said that we should not talk about good and evil at all, but only look at right and wrong!
In a country, those who keep their own laws are good people, but those who harm others are evil people.
It is wrong for one person to do evil to one person, and it is also wrong for hundreds of people to do evil to one person. No matter how many such villains and mobs there are, they will all be punished.
After sending a large number of "villains" to prison, the Legalists proudly said that punishment produces force, force produces strength, force produces power, intimidation produces virtue, and morality arises from punishment. As long as harsh punishments prevent people from breaking the law, the world will be prosperous.
It can be cured.
But they looked at society and human nature too simply. Those who had not committed any crime but were suffering from it, from then on regarded the law as a bad law, Qin as a violent Qin, and when one man made trouble, the world responded.
Pure moral education is naturally undesirable. Are simple legalist punishments enough?
Heifu fell into deep thought.
The original intention and general direction of the case they handled this time was right. It is naturally a good thing that the women who were kidnapped and trafficked can go home. The perpetrators who abused them have been punished as they deserve, which is enough to make people happy.
However, all the people in Blind Mountain, regardless of gender, were punished as concubines according to the crime of continuous imprisonment. Even Heifu could not help but feel a little uneasy because he knew the fate of those people.
In the past month, whenever he went to the county seat to participate in a trial, he would go to the slave market in Anlu County to take a look.
Those two-legged goods filled the cattle and horse stalls, and the air was filled with odor, sweat, and blood, mixed with the stench from the dung ditch of the concubine's prison (lingyu). Looking at those imprisoned in cages or wearing wooden shackles
, or the concubines who were tied together with straw ropes, all of them with withered and unkempt hair, had long lost their expectations for life, only a few little ones with bright eyes stretched out their dirty hands to him
, as if begging for salvation.
It is surprising to say that while the laws of Qin were cracking down on abduction and prohibiting soldiers from selling their wives and children, they also allowed the slave trade. In addition to the captives and barbarians who flowed in from foreign countries, there were many who were tortured and demoted as concubines every year.
The people of Qin were in a worse situation than those women who were robbed and sold. Is there really a big difference between the two? Not really.
If you think about it carefully, this contradiction is actually not a contradiction. The Qin State is a big government with strong control. All things beyond the control of the government are prohibited: business is strictly suppressed, and free movement between household registrations is not allowed. In this way
Only then can people have to seek to change their own class through farming and fighting, so as to achieve the goal of strengthening the army and enriching the country.
In this way, the number of people who were punished as concubines due to crimes and the length of their sentences were all under the control of the government. Moreover, these people could also serve as the bottom of the pyramid of military merit and continuously create labor value for the country.
But private robbery is different. On the one hand, people who have lost their children will feel uneasy, creating chaos and fear. On the other hand, this kind of population flow outside official control cannot bring any benefits to the government, so it is regarded as a cancer.
, must be removed!
After figuring this out, Heifu became even more confused.
"At first I thought of myself as a 'Heavenly Dog' who hates evil and feels that everything I do is right. But now it seems that I, the chief of the pavilion, am just a dog of the Qin government, just a tool to maintain Qin's rule.
Just a tool?”
"Qin Code" is advanced, but there are also big problems. Perhaps this is the root cause of Qin's demise?
It's just that with Heifu's current status, there is nothing he can do about those problems. He knows that this is the limitation of the times. As long as productivity does not break through the critical point, similar things will appear one after another.
Qin's laws can save the troubled times when rituals and music have collapsed, but this kind of wartime laws and regulations cannot be comprehensive and achieve great governance in the world if they are purely magical.
But something is better than nothing.
In this era of competition, where the "Qin Code" can still be enforced, although the slave trade has never stopped and the trafficking of civilian children has been restrained. But in the Six Kingdoms, even this cannot be guaranteed.
What Heifu didn't know was that when he was fighting against the abduction and trafficking incident in Blind Mountain, a poor young man named "Luan Bu" from the Wei State who was slightly younger than him was accidentally trapped by a group of human traffickers while he was working as a servant in a restaurant in Qidi.
He took the sack and sold him as a slave to the Yan Kingdom thousands of miles away. At this moment, Luan Bu was struggling to survive in Jidu, which was besieged by the Qin army...
Twenty years later, when the Qin Dynasty was in chaos and the Qin Law became a piece of paper, that was the beginning of the nightmare. Dou Guangguo, the younger brother of the Empress Dowager Dou, the mother of Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty, and the great uncle of the country, was also abducted and trafficked.
Dou Guangguo was sold to a black charcoal kiln as a charcoal burner more than ten times. In the end, Dou Guangguo was sold to a black charcoal kiln as a charcoal burner. He also encountered an accident during which hundreds of workers died. He was the only one who survived by chance and almost acted in an ancient version of "The Blind Shaft"...
The imperial relatives could not protect themselves, let alone the common people. By then, not only would human trafficking become more and more rampant, but the phenomenon of common people selling their children into slavery would also become more and more intense. It extended to around BC and became the most troublesome slave issue in the Han Dynasty.
Reality is so cruel, no matter how strict it is, okay?
Heifu doesn't know these things. He only knows the general trend of the future but doesn't know the details.
But for now, he already has his own plans.
Even if you have thoughts in your heart, you can't be kind-hearted. You can only do what you think is right within the scope of your authority, and slowly climb up until the day you have the ability to change.
The premise is that he will not forget his state of mind at this moment during the climb.
"Don't ask for everything that everyone wants, but ask for a clear conscience."
After answering Ji Ying in this way, Heifu threw the torch into the blind mountain.
Small flames danced on the thatched roof, like fast-moving squirrels. They devoured the dry grass, gradually grew in size, and turned into fire foxes with wagging tails. They slid across the pillars, jumped up to the beams, and surrounded the entire house.
Everyone lit fires in different directions. Gradually, the entire house in Blind Mountain was burned. There were crackling sounds everywhere, which was firewood exploding. The flames circled and twisted, and finally merged into one. Gradually, they deepened.
In the twilight, like a roaring giant beast, it spit out long tongues of fire, burning up everything that happened in this remote community, licking up the shocking ugliness of sin.
The smoke became thicker and thicker, and everyone in the Huyang Pavilion coughed and retreated. Only Heifu stood in front of this fiery purgatory. The wind caused by the flames blew his naked hair, but he himself remained unmoved.
"I only hope that the tragedy in Blind Mountain can serve as a warning to the entire Anlu County, Nan County, and even the whole country... Killing one will serve as a warning to hundreds, punishing a hundred will serve as a warning to thousands, tens of thousands. If this can be done, it will be worthwhile.
!”
Heifu prayed with fire in his eyes.
This is not just longing.
This is what Heifu has made up his mind to do in the future.
“I only hope that one day, there will never be any more blind mountains in this world!”