Chapter 89: Right and Wrong, Good and Evil

On the first day of the fifth month, standing once more before the crude hamlet gate in Blind Mountain, Heifu felt a complicated mix of emotions.

Perhaps thinking that this year's household count would never meet the target, after the judgment was sent down to the township, the Revenue Officer of Yunshui Township decided to just smash the pot since it was already cracked. He simply gave the order: after sending men to sweep away every last bit of livestock and property in Blind Mountain that should be confiscated, just torch the whole hamlet settlement and be done with it!

After all, the place required a long trek to reach, and now that its administrative status was gone, leaving the houses standing would only give desperate bandits a den to nest in.

This task, of course, fell once again onto the local Bailiff...

Revisiting the old haunt, the men from Huyang Station felt a touch of emotion as well. This was the most dangerous case they had encountered since taking up their posts. If Little Tao had not shot dead that agitator who was inciting people to kill the officials and flee, who knows what would have happened? They might have been pounded into meat paste. Thinking back on it now still sent chills down their spines.

They went in and made a round, discovering that the hamlet settlement, which had once held a trace of human life, was now completely deserted. Sparrows perched on the stoves; a yellow dog, unable to find its master, ran wildly in all directions; everywhere was a scene of utter devastation.

Seeing this, Ji Ying felt a little lost as well. Passing by one household, he recalled that the first time he came to deliver a letter, he had gone inside to ask for a drink of water, and that family had been fairly kind to him.

Back then, seeing the wretched state of those abducted and trafficked women, Ji Ying had wished for nothing more than to slaughter every last person in the hamlet. Yet later, when he heard the verdict, while the dozen or so sentenced to death were certainly not worth pitying, the fact that over a hundred people from the entire hamlet were all condemned to penal labor together was shocking just to hear.

Not to mention the ten or twenty children who had not yet come of age, who would become orphans in the Hidden Office because of this...

So Ji Ying suddenly turned his head and asked Heifu:

"Brother Heifu, what we did this time—was it right, or was it wrong?"

"To save four people, yet send two hundred to prison—is that worth it?"

As Ji Ying posed this question, the other men also raised their heads and looked over. It was plain to see that their hearts were filled with the same doubt.

Heifu pondered for a long while before saying: "One person's violence against one person is a crime; a hundred people's violence against one person is also a crime. Judging by the statutes, you cannot let the guilty go unpunished just because they are many."

Most Confucians believe that human nature is inherently good, like water flowing downward—something innate. Even if someone harbors evil thoughts, it is only because circumstances compel them; all that is needed is morality and education to set them on the right path.

Yet the fact is, even after more than two thousand years of education, in remote places, things like infant drowning and trafficking have never ceased.

To solve the problems that moral education cannot, the Legalists took a diametrically opposite path, asserting that human nature is inherently evil, and that everything stems from "pursuing gain and avoiding harm." This relationship exists between ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife.

For instance, Han Feizi once said with pained indignation, "When it comes to parents and their children, if a son is born, they congratulate one another; if a daughter is born, they kill her." This was a common phenomenon in this era. The imbalance of many men and few women in Blind Mountain was caused by precisely this.

When parents bear children, if a boy is born, they celebrate each other; if a girl is born, they cruelly kill her. Why? Because of profit. A son can carry on the ancestral line and work the fields; a daughter, when grown, requires a dowry, and the family's food is scarce. Raising a bride for someone else's family—it's not worth the cost.

In the eyes of the Legalists, if even one's own flesh-and-blood parents and children calculate profit and loss like this, what more can be said of ordinary people? Therefore, the love of gain and fear of harm are buried deep within human nature and absolutely cannot be changed through postnatal effort!

So the Legalists simply gritted their teeth and said: Let us not speak of good and evil at all, but only judge right from wrong!

Within a state, those who keep to their place and mind their own business are good subjects; if they harm others, they are villains.

One person doing evil to one person is wrong; a hundred people doing evil to one person is also wrong. Such villains and lawless mobs—however many there are, count them all, and every single one must be punished.

After throwing large numbers of "villains" into prison, the Legalists declared smugly: Punishment generates strength, strength generates power, power generates awe, awe generates virtue—virtue is born from punishment. As long as strict laws and harsh penalties make people dare not transgress, the realm can be brought to great order.

But they viewed society and human nature too simplistically. Those who had committed no crime yet were implicated came to see the law as evil law, and Qin as tyrannical Qin. One man raised a revolt, and the whole realm answered.

Pure moral education is of course unworkable, but is pure Legalist punishment sufficient?

Heifu sank into deep thought.

In the case they handled this time, the original intent and the broad direction were correct. Those abducted and trafficked women were able to return home, which was naturally a good thing. The abusers who tormented them received their due punishment, which was deeply gratifying.

But to punish the entire populace of Blind Mountain, regardless of gender, under collective liability and sentence them all to be bondservants—even Heifu could not help feeling a twinge of unease, because he knew what fate awaited those people.

Over the past month, whenever he went to the county seat to take part in the trials, he would always go to the slave market in Anlu County to take a look.

Those two-legged goods crammed the cattle and horse pens; the air was thick with a foul stench—sweat, fresh blood, mixed with the reek wafting from the bondservants' prison cesspits. Looking at those bondservants, caged in pens or wearing wooden shackles or tied together with straw ropes, each one withered and disheveled, having long lost any hope for life, only a few young bondservants with still-bright eyes stretched their filthy hands toward him, as if pleading for rescue.

It is astonishing to say: while Qin law cracked down on trafficking and strictly forbade soldiers and commoners from selling their wives and children, it simultaneously permitted the slave trade. Aside from captives and barbarians flowing in from foreign states, every year, many Qin people were sentenced to become bondservants through collective punishment. Their plight was even worse than those abducted and trafficked women. To insist there is truly that great a difference between the two? Not entirely.

Thinking carefully, this contradiction is not really a contradiction. The Qin state was a big government with an extremely strong desire for control. Anything beyond official control was banned: commerce was tightly suppressed, and free movement between household registers was forbidden. Only in this way could people be forced to seek a change in their social class solely through the two paths of farming and warfare, thereby achieving the goal of a strong military and a rich state.

In this way, the number of people punished by becoming bondservants for crimes, and the length of their sentences, were all under official control. Moreover, these people could serve as the bottom layer of the military-merit nobility pyramid, continuously creating labor value for the state.

But private trafficking was different. On one hand, commoners who lost their children would grow uneasy, creating chaos and fear. On the other hand, this kind of population and class movement outside official control brought no benefit whatsoever to the authorities, and so it was seen as a malignant tumor that had to be excised!

After figuring this out, Heifu grew even more perplexed.

The Qin Code is advanced, but it also has enormous problems. Perhaps this is the root cause of Qin's downfall?

Only, regarding those problems, at Heifu's current station, he was powerless to do anything. He knew this was the limitation of the era; as long as productivity did not break through a critical point, similar events would emerge in an endless stream.

The Qin Code could save a great chaotic age of collapsing rites and ruined music, but such wartime regulations, relying purely on law and method, could not cover every aspect and achieve great order for the realm.

Yet having something is always better than having nothing.

In this era of comparing who is worse, in places where the Qin Code could still be enforced, although the slave trade never ceased, the trafficking of commoners' children was at least somewhat restrained. But in the Six Kingdoms, even this much could not be guaranteed.

Heifu did not know that, just as he was cracking down on the trafficking in Blind Mountain, a youth slightly younger than him, a poor boy from Wei named Luan Bu, working as a hired hand in a tavern in Qi, was accidentally stuffed into a sack by a gang of traffickers and sold into slavery over a thousand li away in Yan. At this very moment, Luan Bu was struggling to survive inside the besieged city of Ji, surrounded by Qin troops...

Twenty years later, when the great chaos of the late Qin erupted and the Qin Code became a mere scrap of paper, that would be the true beginning of the nightmare. The younger brother of Empress Dowager Dou, mother of Emperor Jing of Han—the堂堂 uncle of the emperor, Dou Guangguo—was himself abducted and trafficked, and not just once, but over a dozen times. In the end, Dou Guangguo was sold to a charcoal kiln to work as a burner. During that time, he encountered an accident where over a hundred workers perished, and only he survived by sheer luck, nearly acting out an ancient version of Blind Shaft...

If even imperial relatives could not protect themselves, what of commoners? By then, not only would human trafficking grow ever more rampant, but the phenomenon of commoners selling their children into slavery would also intensify, stretching on into the years around the turn of the era, becoming the most troublesome slave problem of the great Han dynasty.

Reality is this cruel. If we don't govern strictly, can we?

Heifu knew none of these things. Of the future, he understood only the broad trends, not the details.

But for the present, he had already formed his own plan.

Though his heart was burdened with thought, he could not indulge in misplaced compassion. He could only, within the scope of his authority, do well what he believed to be right, slowly climbing upward, until the day he had the power to change things.

The premise being that, in the process of climbing, he would not forget the state of his heart at this very moment.

"I do not seek to satisfy everyone, only to have a clear conscience."

After answering Ji Ying thus, Heifu hurled his torch into Blind Mountain hamlet.

Tiny flames darted across the thatched roofs, like squirrels swift in movement. They devoured the dry grass, slowly growing larger, turning into fire foxes wagging their tails, sliding past pillars, leaping onto roof beams, engulfing the entire house.

The men scattered to set fires in all directions. Gradually, every house in Blind Mountain hamlet was ablaze. Everywhere was the crackling and popping of firewood bursting. The flames coiled and twisted, finally merging into one. In the deepening twilight, it was like a roaring giant beast, spitting out a long tongue of fire, burning away everything that had ever happened in this remote hamlet settlement, licking clean all those shocking, hideous sins until nothing remained.

The smoke grew thicker and thicker. The men of Huyang Station retreated one after another, coughing. Only Heifu stood before this blazing inferno; the wind stirred by the flames sent his red headscarf fluttering wildly, yet he himself stood firm and unmoving.

"I only hope that the tragedy of Blind Mountain can serve as a warning to all of Anlu County, to Nan Commandery, and even to the entire nation and the whole realm... Execute one to warn a hundred; punish a hundred to warn a thousand, ten thousand. If it can achieve that, then it is worth it!"

Firelight reflected in his eyes, Heifu made this wish.

This was not merely a longing.

This was also what Heifu, having made up his mind, resolved to carry out with all his strength from now on.

"I only hope that one day, in this world, there will never again be a Blind Mountain!"

(End of chapter)