Everything had two sides. Nothing was perfect.
The reason the solution of "The people may be made to follow, but they may not be made to understand" had been passed down for over two thousand years was naturally that it had its own logic.
In a feudal society, what level of living standards was best for the common people?
The facts had proven that it was the subsistence line.
That sounded absurd. Wasn't it better for the people to live prosperous, peaceful, and contented lives?
Yes, it was not.
In fact, Wang Xuan himself understood this point.
There were many reasons for it. The first was that the amount of land was limited. There was only so much arable land, and not all of it could be used to grow food. Setting aside crop rotation, economic crops such as mulberry, cotton, and hemp also needed farmland, so the population that could ultimately be supported was limited.
Once the limit was reached or nearly reached, any natural or man-made disaster would inevitably trigger a sweeping catastrophe. When that happened, there would be no escape from ruin. When the nest was overturned, no eggs remained intact.
In ancient times, without new food crops, fertilizers, and other such conditions, the best way to prolong a regime's rule was to keep the people below the subsistence line. Hunger was the most effective way to control population growth. Otherwise, no empire could last more than fifty years.
Take the Han Dynasty as an example. Before Wang Xuan arrived, even during the Han Dynasty's peak, the entire empire could support no more than seventy million people at most. That figure included hidden households, and it remained unchanged until the early years of the Song Dynasty, when it was finally surpassed after Jiangnan was truly developed.
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