Volume 6 Chapter 106 - Creating some slaves (1/2)

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.