Book 5: Chapter 92: Why abolish slavery?
This matter happened in the southern Candra Empire which was several thousand kilometers away, so it didn’t affect the Stantine Duchy and the Frestech Chamber of Commerce.
Recently, in the Stantine Duchy and even the surrounding countries, the thing that most people cared about was a bill that the Stantine Duchy congress was passing.
This was a bill that the Frestech Chamber of Commerce’s chairman Xu had passed through a normal congress member.
With Xu Yi’s influence in the Stantine Duchy, he could easily pass any proposal that he wanted, but he had spent two months after bringing this into the congress and it had to pass the ballot vote before they decided to pass this bill.
The reason why it was so hard to pass was because the contents were too shocking.
This proposal was to abolish slavery!
When Xu Yi first proposed this, everyone had thought that he was insane.
Since the elves ruled the continent thousands of years ago, slaves had always existed on the Sines Continent. To this point, the history of slaves had passed ten thousand years.
In these ten thousand years, no matter what changed on the continent, slavery had never changed. Even in the two thousand years after the race wars, slavery had reached a peak on the continent.
Before the race wars, the elves had treated all other races like slaves and after the race wars, it had changed into the humans wildly capturing the other races as slaves.
As for the humans, they also took large amounts of their own race as slaves.
For all the people of the Sines Continent, the existence of slavery was a norm that everyone was already used to and no one thought there was anything wrong with it.
Now that Xu Yi was saying that he wanted to abolish slavery, this was simply going against common knowledge and challenging the customs of the continent.
Especially those slave owners who earned quite a bit from their slaves, they had snorted in contempt at Xu Yi’s proposal, vigorously opposing it.
Because of the Frestech Chamber of Commerce’s great influence on the Stantine Duchy, all the lords of the Stantine Duchy could only cooperate and wouldn’t dare oppose Xu Yi’s proposals at all.
But when Xu Yi made this proposal, those lords that all listened to Xu Yi all came together to voice their opposition to this proposal.
In the first vote of this proposal, the votes in favour of this proposal was actually a shocking zero vote!
It could be seen that this proposal had a large impact on everyone, so that was why the reaction was so strong.
But with the strong influence the Frestech Chamber of Commerce had in the Stantine Duchy, with the strong urging of Xu Yi, this proposal gated votes bit by bit. Finally, it reached the point where it had passed.
And today, the Stantine Duchy congress had finally reached the day where they passed this proposal.
As long as this proposal passed today, it meant that starting from this day, the Stantine Duchy would truly abolish slavery.
According to the statistics, there were one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy thousand people who were slaves in the Stantine Duchy.
Once this was abolished, over a hundred and sixty thousand slaves would become citizens. There was no doubt that the social impact of this would be huge.
So whether this proposal passed or not, it would create giant waves in the entire Stantine Duchy.
To many people, this wasn’t a good thing.
“Why am I doing all this to abolish slavery?” Xu Yi looked at Baron Hannas in front of him with a faint smile and slowly shook his head, “Of course it’s not like people said, I’m not a saint that can’t watch the slaves suffer, so I want to abolish this system and free them.”
“You can’t completely deny this though, right? Based on the attitude you have towards the slaves under you, you are very kind to the slaves.” Baron Hannas kept asking.
Although the Stantine Duchy congress would be deciding whether Xu Yi’s abolishing slavery bill would pass, because this matter attracted too many people’s attentions, countless reporters had come with the intention of reporting on this matter.
The congress would be held in the afternoon, so in the morning, Xu Yi had held a press conference and accepted interviews from the various reporters.
At the press conference, there were reporters from the Lampuri Kingdom, the Rudson Kingdom, the Drake Duchy, the Mirando Duchy, the Norton Duchy…..and various other countries. There were even three newspapers from the Sack Kingdom who had sent reporters.
The total number of reporters surpassed five hundred people, so the large hall was completely filled without a single bit of room to step in.
The reporters were well informed people, so naturally they knew about the close friendship between Xu Yi and the «Lampuri Weekly’s» editor in chief Baron Hannas, so the first questions were given to him.
“From a personal perspective, I do indeed not want to see slaves being treated this cruelly because to me, there’s no difference between us and slaves, we are all humans. Why should we separate ourselves and treat our own kind like domestic animals?” Xu Yi said with a serious look.
“But other than humans slaves, there are also slaves of other races. Should we treat them the same as our race?” A reporter suddenly asked in a loud voice.
The other reporters all looked at the reporter who asked this, thinking that this fellow truly was an idiot.
It was worth it to ask other people this, but to ask Xu Yi this, this was completely a waste of time.
As expected, Xu Yi replied with a faint smile, “Other races aren’t that different from humans, right? Our Frestech Chamber of Commerce has hired other race workers over the years and I haven’t seen anything different about them. If you really want to talk about it, perhaps each culture has their differences. However, even among us humans, aren’t there cultural differences because of different nations? So I don’t think that this is a problem at all.”
“Chairman Xu, let’s get back on topic. You said that from a personal perspective, you want to see slavery abolished, but you are the Frestech Chamber of Commerce’s chairman. Everyone knows that you are someone with influence, so if you raise this proposal, it’s impossible that it’s just from your personal perspective, right?” A reporter asked.
“Of course.” Xu Yi didn’t hesitate at all as he acknowledged this with a nod, “This proposal also comes from the general perspective.”
“Chairman Xu, I am a reporter from the Rudson Kingdom. Before coming here, I’ve heard that in our Rudson Kingdom, there is a company producing Magic Lamps that only hires slave workers. So the cost of their Magic Lamps are much lower and their Magic Lamps are much cheaper than the Frestech Brand Magic Lamp, which is greatly welcomed in our Rudson Kingdom. Is your proposal to abolish slavery because of the threat that this company poses to you?” A reporter from the crowd asked in a loud voice.
The minds of the reporters under the stage all turned.
This was the first time many people were hearing about this and if it was true, Xu Yi’s reason for proposing this was quite interesting.
Xu Yi looked at that reporter and asked back, “Are you talking about the Sanchi Chamber of Commerce from Rio City?”
That reporter was surprised, but he didn’t reply as he silently admitted it.
Xu Yi continued with a smile, “First, my proposal is only for the Stantine Duchy. Even if this proposal passes, it doesn’t affect the Rudson Kingdom. The Sanchi Chamber of Commerce can keep using slave workers, this isn’t a problem and it won’t affect them.”
The crowd under the stage nodded.
The Stantine Duchy was only a small country, it was much worse than the Rudson Kingdom.
If it wasn’t for the Frestech Chamber of Commerce and the fact that this proposal was too shocking, there wouldn’t be that many people paying attention to the laws of a single small country.
“Second, the Sanchi Chamber of Commerce’s Magic Lamps haven’t passed the quality inspection of the Rudson Kingdom’s magic machine industry management department, but they are choosing to sell them privately. They have gone against the laws of the management department and now are being heavily investigated, even being suspended. Did you not know about this?”
Everyone’s eyes fell onto the face of the reporter of the Rudson Kingdom who looked a bit awkward.
It was clear that he knew about this, but he deliberately chose not to mention it.
“Finally, why do you think that I would feel threatened by the Magic Lamps of this kind of company? I think…..that any reporter here wouldn’t think that this Sanchi Chamber of Commerce would pose a threat to our Frestech Chamber of Commerce, right?”
The crowd couldn’t help nodding again.
They had never even heard of this Sanchi Chamber of Commerce, how could it be used to compare to the Frestech Chamber of Commerce?
This fellow actually thought that Xu Yi felt the Sanchi Chamber of Commerce posed a threat to the Frestech Chamber of Commerce, this was simply a joke!
That reporter had a red look on his face, but he didn’t give up as he said, “Chairman Xu, perhaps the Sanchi Chamber of Commerce can’t pose any threat to your Frestech Chamber of Commerce, but you’re afraid that other companies will use the cost advantage of using slaves to compete with your Frestech Chamber of Commerce, right? You want to abolish sales because you’re already expecting this to happen!”
The reporters once again fell into silence.
Actually, this was what they thought too.
If it wasn’t for the consideration of the Frestech Chamber of Commerce, why would Xu Yi waste all this effort to do this thankless job and go against all those people to abolish slavery?
“Perhaps you’re right, this is indeed a problem. But I must remind you of a fact that not just right now, even a few years ago, many companies have been using slaves and they couldn’t gain any advantage. You understand why this is, right?” Xu Yi asked back.
Everyone looked at each other. They thought that Xu Yi’s question was a bit unreasonable, but after carefully thinking about it, it was thought provoking.
Yes, slaves haven’t just existed on the Sines Continent for a day or two.
There were many magic machine companies in the surrounding countries and may of them used sales to reduce their production cost, but they couldn’t gain any advantage.
This wasn’t the plot of the Frestech Chamber of Commerce because in the magic machine industry, it was impossible for a company to compare to the Frestech Chamber of Commerce.
And compared to the other companies in the same industry, the companies that used slaves didn’t have that many advantages.
“This is the biggest reason I want to abolish slavery and the overall conclusion that I’ve drawn. The reason is actually very simple, most slaves in my opinion can’t be considered a complete labour force.”
“Because slaves cannot be educated and don’t have any enthusiasm or drive. Even if they work in production, they will work passively. These kinds of workers would only reduce production costs, but it would actually affect the production efficiency and quality.”
“From the perspective of a merchant, these slaves are a negative asset for a company. What I want to do is to transform those negative assets into positive assets!”