Chapter 789: Propagation
“A-choo!”
Sun Shaozong was sitting alone in the study. He had just spread out a draft on the desk when he suddenly felt an itchy nostril. He quickly turned his head to the empty space and sneezed loudly.
Who is thinking about me again?
Is it the Princess of Prince Beijing who left not long ago, or is it Aunt Xue who lost her virginity to her by accident last night?
Sun Shaozong rubbed his nose and thought about it for a while without getting to the point. Then he focused his attention on the draft on the table.
Since the second day after he joined the Dali Temple, he had been thinking about how to establish his authority and break the impasse. Although he had established his authority when investigating the case later, he was far from breaking the impasse.
What he wanted to break through was not his own isolated and helpless situation in the Dali Temple, but the embarrassing situation of the entire Dali Temple among the three judicial departments.
In fact, the crux of the Dali Temple's current problem is nothing more than the four words "disconnection between the top and the bottom".
Although it is called the Supreme Law Enforcement Agency for the country's laws and regulations, the current Dali Temple is actually a "wait-and-seek" government office. It has almost no power to control local governments and can only wait for them to voluntarily hand over difficult cases.
However, local governments, in order to protect their own political achievements and reputation, are extremely resistant to this.
As a result, the Dali Temple became like a duckweed in the wind, with almost no foundation at all.
After losing its practical significance, the status of the Dali Temple in the Three Judicial Departments and even in the entire court naturally declined.
Nowadays, it has even become a vassal of the Censorate. Most of the cases it handles throughout the year are transferred to it by the Censorate, and it only needs to make a verdict according to the other party's wishes.
The more this happened, the less the people-friendly officials took the Dali Temple seriously, thus further forming a vicious cycle.
In order to reverse this situation, it is undoubtedly necessary to rebuild the foundation of the Dali Temple and then take back some power from the Ministry of Justice and the Censorate.
In fact, it is not difficult to find out from the files that when Wei Yi first took office, he also thought about revitalizing the situation.
In the first year of his administration, he obtained three imperial edicts, asking officials from all regions to voluntarily report difficult and complicated cases and sending working groups to investigate and survey the situation.
But these actions ultimately came to nothing.
The reasons were, firstly, that the Dali Temple lacked the means to control the local officials; secondly, the Dali Temple did not have many elite officers, and when they arrived at the local places, they were completely in the dark, and not only did they fail to find out anything, but they also made a lot of jokes.
Joining forces with Wei Yi was not a strong order, he just wanted to make some big moves as a new official.
Seeing that his intention to report the case proactively did not receive a response from local officials, and the working group he sent out caused a lot of controversy, Wei Yi immediately became discouraged.
Since then, the prestige of the Dali Temple has further declined, leading to today's predicament.
If we carefully analyze the reasons why Wei Yi failed, the biggest problem was that he placed all his hopes on imperial power but did not dare to touch the interests of the Censorate and the Ministry of Justice.
As a result, this top-down trend only caused some fluctuations and was still several blocks away from a sandstorm, let alone a complete change of the world.
But this cannot be entirely blamed on Wei Yi.
Let's not talk about the Ministry of Justice. In the current system, the Ministry of Justice is in a supervisory position. Given the current state of decline of the Dali Temple, it is basically wishful thinking to want to seize power from the Ministry of Justice.
Of course, if the situation were to reverse in the future, it would be completely impossible to deprive the Ministry of Justice of some of its rights.
As for the Censorate...
Although there is no direct supervisory authority over the Dali Temple, it is responsible for supervising the discipline of all officials. Its deterrent effect on civil and military officials is a hundred times stronger than that of the Dali Temple, which is known as the "general constitution of the world's discipline" but has no real power.
Therefore, it is extremely difficult to seize power from the Censorate.
Especially since these people are just pens and verbal battles who make a living. If they really start a quarrel in public, how can it be easy for them to seize power without a foothold?
Therefore, when Sun Shaozong first took office, he also had a headache for a while.
Fortunately, although he was not from the court or procuratorate system, he still had some understanding of this system and finally borrowed some ideas from it:
Since it is not easy to seize power and using imperial power to exert pressure is not very effective, it is better to start from scratch and create a system that can take root in the local area and conform to the core powers of the Dali Temple.
The core of this system is also four words: popularize the law in rural areas!
In addition to investigating difficult and complicated cases reported from various places, or handling imperial cases on imperial orders, the Dali Temple was also responsible for compiling and disseminating laws.
The previous situation is now under the charge of Sun Shaozong, but it has a considerable degree of overlap with the Ministry of Justice and the Censorate.
The latter two parts should be under the jurisdiction of Right Shaoqing Li Wenshan.
However, over the years, the Right Shaoqing of the Dali Temple was only responsible for compiling laws and rarely got involved in propaganda.
Not only that, according to what Sun Shaozong saw and heard when he was the governor, local officials were also passive and lazy in the work of popularizing the law.
Because the popular argument nowadays is: the people can be made to follow it, but they cannot be made to understand it.
It is enough as long as the law is in the hands of officials. As for the ordinary people, the more laws they know, the more likely they are to become troublemakers.
In fact, this kind of speech and thinking has not been completely eliminated in later generations.
Fortunately, Sun Shaozong did not expect to completely eliminate it. For him, as long as he could use this as an excuse to find another way within the powers of the Three Judicial Departments, it would be enough.
However, it is definitely not feasible to propose "legal education in rural areas" out of thin air - at least we need to find some evidence to prove that it is necessary to do so, rather than just asking for trouble.
It was for this reason that Sun Shaozong asked Liu Xianglian and others to check and compile records of mass fights by the people in various places in recent years.
Before, he was an official in the capital and didn't feel anything.
After traveling south to Huguang, I discovered that collective fights among the people were occurring one after another because of disputes over water, land, and even people's reputation.
This is because local governments lack control, and also because most people only know the elders of their clans and do not know the laws of the court. Once a conflict arises, they often resolve it with violence.
Only those who are weak and bullied by the powerful will think of the government.
However, local officials often find it difficult to make a clear judgment on such matters where each has his own reasons. Even if they intervene, they will often be seen as favoring one side, and even if they make a ruling, it will be difficult for it to take effect.
At that time, Sun Shaozong felt that he should find ways to increase the government's control and try to avoid such things from happening. Otherwise, as time went by, the local clan forces would definitely become less and less respectful of the government.
Once the local situation gets completely out of control, the Zhou Dynasty will probably be on its way to its end.
Now that I'm employed at the Dali Temple, it's a good opportunity for me to combine the two things. By popularizing the law, I try to curb the increasingly rampant private fighting in the countryside. At the same time, I take advantage of the popularization of the law to establish my influence in the local area, and even take the opportunity to seize some of the power of jurisdiction.
Of course, the details involved are definitely not that simple, and they need to be carefully considered before they can be discussed in the court.
In short, as long as he can accomplish one of these two things in the end, Sun Shaozong’s service as an official in the Dali Temple will not be in vain.
