Volume 5 Chapter 92 - Why abolish slavery? (1/2)

Volume 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.