Volume 6 Chapter 106 - Creating Some Slaves
Even on earth with its developed transportation and communication system, it was very hard to get an accurate survey of the population.
On the Sines Continent, to get the accurate population on a map was even more impossible.
But even if they didn’t have a specific number, just based on eyeballing it, one could tell that Stasom City and the surrounding area had very few people.
Looking further, there was only wilderness. If one looked further from Stasom City to find a place where people lived, they could only find around two small villages that weren’t that far away from Stasom City.
And according to the data that Stasom City’s City Lord Count Hughes had provided, the number of Marlow Empire citizens under Stasom City was only around fifty thousand. It was even less than Banta City in the past.
Stasom City was the biggest city on the Marlow Empire’s northern coast and had the most people.
Even Stasom City only had fifty thousand people, so the other places could only have less people.
“Sir Baron, according to the plan, after this base is built, there will be a need for over two hundred thousand people. However, Stasom City only has a total of no more than fifty thousand and there are many who can't work at all.” Hogan said in a very helpless voice.
“Un…...This is indeed a very serious problem.” Franklin touched his chin that was covered in a beard that was like fur and fell into thought for a bit before saying, “But this problem isn’t hard to solve. We can openly recruit in the empire and I think that as long as there’s good work where you can earn quite a bit of gold coins, there will definitely be quite a few people willing to come here.”
“That might not be so.” Hogan shook his head, “This environment really is too bad compared to inland, with the weather in winter being especially hard for people to accept. So even if our company has prepared everything, it can’t remove this worry for everyone. Moreover, the most important question is…..making them leave their hometowns, there aren’t that many people who would accept it.”
Franklin knitted his brows, “That’s right, for the citizens of the empire, it is more important than anything to stay in their hometowns. If there is no need, no one is willing to leave their homes.”
Hogan gave a cough, “This…..Lord Baron, it’s not like there’s no way. It depends on whether you and the Lord Marquis can come to a decision?”
Franklin looked at Hogan in surprise before understanding what he meant.
“What? You want us to forcefully move some people in the empire over? This really is too hard……”
“No, no, no…...I was never talking about this, Lord Baron, don’t misunderstand.” Hogan waved his hand, “I mean can we use the connections of your Southgate Family and the Makaros Family to buy some slaves as workers?”
“Slaves?” Franklin was surprised, “You think that those lowly fellows can do the complex work in your factories?”
“This…..Actually when our company was just formed, because we didn’t have enough people, we had taken quite a few slaves as workers. Perhaps they can’t do the complicated work, but for normal and monotonous work, there should be no problem giving that to them.” Hogan explained.
“But slaves…..” Franklin knitted his brows to think before shaking his head, “It might not work. It’s different compared to before because there hasn’t been a large scale war for many years on the continent, so there are less and less slaves. Even our family has less than a thousand slaves. To meet the demand of two hundred thousand that you mentioned, even taking all the slaves of the noble families we have relations with wouldn’t be enough.”
“Is that so?” This was something Hogan never expected.
He thought that the Marlow Empire as one of the two continents, with its long history would be different from the Stantine Duchy that had completely eliminated slavery. They would have a large number of slaves at their disposal.
But he never thought that even the Marlow Empire would have few slaves, even finding it hard to get two hundred thousand of them.
Hogan couldn’t help knitting his brows.
It wasn’t hard to construct the base, but the most important problem was having enough manpower to run it.
The most important thing was naturally having people.
If there weren’t enough people, there was no need to mention anything else.
“Could it be that we still need to invest further?” Hogan muttered in his heart.
When coming up with the plan for this magic machine production base, the Frestech Chamber of Commerce had considered all the factors affecting production here, so they had thought about buying slaves as workers.
But now that Franklin had told him that there weren’t that many slaves in the Marlow Empire and that the nobles would transfer their personal slaves that easily, it seemed like it would be hard to collect them.
If this plan didn’t work, the only thing they could do was increase their investments here to increase the salary of the workers and attract more people to work here.
But this environment was very bad and to attract enough people to come here, the salary that they would have to offer would clearly be very high.
In their beginning plans, the Frestech Chamber of Commerce was only planning on giving the workers in their factories ten gold coins a month.
It should be said that this was very attractive for most citizens in the Marlow Empire, but to rely on ten gold coins to pull people all the way to the freezing north, it wouldn’t be that easy.
Hogan calculated it and he thought that it would take an average of at least fifteen gold coins.
If they wanted to recruit two hundred thousand people, if they paid each person give gold coins a month, then it would cost them a full million gold coins for two hundred thousand people a month!
This would greatly increase the amount they would need to invest in the magic machine production base, this was not something that the Frestech Chamber of Commerce or anyone who had invested in the base was willing to see.
“Right.” Franklin suddenly gave a clap, “Manager Hogan, actually…..it’s impossible to get slaves, but we can make our own.”
Hogan looked at him with a confused look, “Make our own? How?”
“You see, most of the slaves come from war and because there hasn’t been a major war in the past several hundred years, there have been less and less slaves…..”
“Wait……” Hogan couldn’t help raising his hand to cut him off, “Lord Baron, are you suggesting that we should start a war? Are…..Are you kidding?”
Franklin shook his head before giving a laugh, “It’s not that exaggerated, but going to capture some slaves as manpower isn’t that big of a problem.”
“I still don’t know what you mean.” Hogan knitted his brows, “Could it be that you want us to attack other countries and bring their people back as slaves?”
“No, no, if we attack other countries, that really would be starting a war. Although our Marlow Empire doesn’t fear any country on the continent, if we start arbitrarily attacking countries, even his majesty can’t help us.”
“Then you mean……”
“If we can’t attack other countries, that doesn’t mean we can’t attack other races…..” Franklin revealed a smile of deep meaning.
“Ha? Other races?” Hogan was a bit stunned.
“That’s right. Actually, because the environment in the empire’s north is bad, there are few citizens that are willing to live here, so there are few people here. But for those other races that can’t live in human territories, this is a good place. According to what I know, there are three beastmen tribes near Stasom City and they have at least over four thousand beastmen.”
“Beastmen?” Hogan was surprised, “There are beastmen here?”
When he said this, he couldn’t help laughing.
This was simply nonsense.
The race that had the biggest population on the continent was without a doubt the humans.
The race with the second biggest population were the beastmen.
Compared to the scattered dwarves, the rarely seen elves, and the halflings that already became legends, the beastmen were the most commonly seen other race on the continent.
At least in many countries, there was a strong beastmen influence. Although they couldn’t overthrow the humans, there was no problem for them to occupy a territory.
Because the land they occupied was barren land that humans didn’t want. Adding in the fact that beastmen had decent military strength, as long as they didn’t cause any trouble, the human countries wouldn’t care about them.
This was very clear in the Lampuri Kingdom.
The Black Rice Wasteland in theory mainly belonged to the Lampuri Kingdom, with a small part that belonged to the Sack Kingdom.
But with the large number of beastmen who occupied the Black Rice Wasteland, the Lampuri Kingdom and the Sack Kingdom ignored them, allowing the beastmen to live there.
Of course, because of the appearance of the Frestech Chamber of Commerce, most of the beastmen tribes on the Black Rice Wasteland were working with the Frestech Chamber of Commerce or other human companies. They had integrated into the nearby human society, so Hogan had already completely ignored this problem that existed on the continent.
The Marlow Empire was one of the two large empires, it wasn’t strange if there were beastmen in their territory.
“Of course there are and there’s quite a bit of them.” Franklin gave an honest nod in response, “Although I don’t know the exact numbers, there are many beastmen living in the north of the empire. The people in the empire even estimate that there are over a million beastmen here, which is quite a large number.”
“Over a million?” Hogan was truly scared by this number.
Although the Black Rice Wasteland had many beastmen, there were more than two hundred thousand of them and no more than three hundred thousand of them in total.
He never thought that there would be over a million beastmen in the Marlow Empire’s north alone which really was quite terrifying.
“Un, the largest beastmen tribe has over a hundred thousand people. Think about it, if we capture the entire beastmen tribe to become slaves, wouldn’t that solve our problem?” There was an enticement that was in Franklin’s voice.
Hogan had seen many beastmen workers in the Frestech Chamber of Commerce and didn’t fear them at all, but he couldn’t help thinking that this was a good idea when he heard this.
But when he came back to his senses, seeing Franklin’s expectant gaze, he thought about it before saying, “This problem is too important, I have to ask sir chairman for instructions first.”