She's been busy meeting people about her 'let's stop racing and also give the nobility and the Church control over what gets voted on' proposal, but it's getting too late for most respectable meetings. 

"Delegate Tallandria. How was the evening event?" She also had spies attending, of course, but they weren't invited upstairs.

Rocky and upsetting. "Productive, I think. The biggest single concern there was in fact unfair contracts, including unfair debt agreements, indenture, and serfdom. There was a particular idea floated that I did want to get your opinion on. Someone suggested that we could give the right to everyone - regardless of what contracts they are bound by - to serve some organized churches, or join an organized religious order, with the consent of that church or that order, effectively giving some subset of clerics the right to dissolve unfair contracts. We don't have agreed-on implementation details. Some people want a list of approved churches. I think possibly it would be better to have a list of approved orders, with charters approved by the crown and reapproved every few years, so there's a check on irresponsible use of the contract-breaking powers. Used judiciously, it could be a floor on how bad things can get, and direct large numbers of people towards religious service and useful work. But I don't know very much about religious orders."

"Huh. I do not know of orders having been employed in that fashion, unless you count places that take those who default on their debt and send them to the Worldwound and I don't think I'd really count that. ...historically most religious orders owned land, and had income from that land, as a nobleman does, but instead of passing the land down to their sons as a nobleman does it would be passed down within the order. There were orders for the care of orphans, and for the care of the blind, lame, or mad. There were orders that were perhaps best thought of as just a household, with the usual range of work except that the members were whoever took vows. Perhaps when we visit Lastwall you can talk to some people in the orders there. 

My concern about using non-martial orders as a - route for the desperate to escape - is that I think that they work because of the sincere devotion of the participants, their choice to make the service of a god the central matter of their life, and if they took too many people for other reasons it'd change their character and perhaps lose most of what makes them good. Of course there are always some people in an order who did not want it and were forced to it by their families, but - ordinarily I think it is not the majority, and if it's gradual there is the opportunity to shape them to their life over time. 

Martial orders might work better for this, because they can make more use of men with no particular desire to be there, but for that there's just the Reclamation, which is neither trying to grow its numbers nor suited to power over Chelish people, and the Hellknights, who - I'm not sure how thoroughly they've reformed. I suppose you could also say that joining the army's a route out of any indenture, though I'd want to ask the Archduke d'Sirmium what he thought of that."

"I think we might want some new hellknight orders, but not for this. For this we'd want many groups to be doing work that lots of people can do - reasonably strict rules, but little skill. The first person to bring it up was just thinking about people who could help out around temples, and do work that the priests are too busy to, but I think we can do more than that. The church best-suited to set up orders of last resort is probably Erastil's, if we allow farming communities run by rules agreeable to his priests. And then it's very easy, right, for any group that can secure land; the order is the people working the land, not just a group supported by collecting rent from it. The escaping serfs will go on doing the farm labor they're used to, but under the authority of the Erastilians, instead of a landowner who inherited them under hell. It wouldn't be a group of impressive elites, like the paladins or the hellknights, but it could absorb a large number of people and catechize them towards doing reasonable things with their lives. 

I had also been thinking about other escape routes - maybe the army, maybe crown labor camps, if we can bound them not to include mining - but a model where we have orders of last resort seems like it might make the people who go to them actively better, and maybe still prepare them to do something else afterward, if we don't require lifelong vows."

" - you know, actually," she says, now betraying some excitement, "You could combine this with the need to do something with the overwhelming number of orphans, and have the Erastilian orders both work land and separately be of use to the state by requiring their members to each adopt an orphan. That's the traditional remit of a religious order, then, but under conditions that the sower on the family committee would probably accept, since the children are being adopted into new families - sort of - and not being kept in underfunded orphanages. I'm not saying it would definitely go amazingly, but people in bad contracts aren't really especially selected for being bad parents, and the idea of it being an order is that they have oversight, and can be taught to do it well. Obviously we would need to convince some Erastilians to found orders like that, but - I think it could be done."

“There are plenty of lords we haven’t replaced only because there is no one to replace them with, and plenty of places without enough men to work the land you’ve got. If you find me an Erastilian who wants to do it I will probably give him the land on the spot. Your problem is men qualified to do this who want to do this; if you can find those we can find land for the orders. - I’d give you an orphanage order, if you want one, only you’d need a husband who can defend your person and the land.”

"I'd take a husband, if he were trustworthy and decent to people and didn't despise me, but I've generally assumed that the overlap between those things is zero," she says, shockingly evenly, because somehow this response materializes fully-formed in her brain and demands to be spoken before the rest of her brain can get around to asking why the hell you need a husband to run a religious order. Aren't there supposed to be religious orders specifically for unmarried women?? 

- also she doesn't have a deity. That seems like more of a sticking point. Although she supposes she's not entirely sure whether the proposal needs to ban secular orders or "religious orders" headed by non-priests, if everything is by crown approval anyway. Hm.

It would also work for Korva to pick up a deity but that seems much less actionable. "That really seems too pessimistic," she says. "If this were a course you seriously wished to pursue I'd ask Ardiaca, or the Archduke Requena, or the Archduchess, for an introduction to one of their men who meets that description and I'd expect they have several apiece. I don't, but that's because I've had to piece a staff together from scratch; they came in with one."

Now that she considers it she doesn't think what she said on no thought is false, but she has very high standards for demonstrating trustworthiness. "I'd consider it, though I think you will lose a lot of people at the step where they have to not despise me. And at this exact moment I don't think I should commit to doing anything in particular after the convention, I haven't really had enough time to think about it properly. I can find you an Erastilian who'll do it, though. Uh, run an order, not marry me."

"If you find me an Erastilian who wants to run an orphanage order I can give them land to do it on. They used to be in the mountains, at holy sites, and attract pilgrims, but I don't know if that part is viable right now."

That sounds not ideal as a site of agriculture or as a place for pilgrims to go to, and she doesn't know Erastil to have any holy sites, but she supposes she wouldn't.

"I have also been thinking about the scheduling committee. I think a lot of people are receptive to the idea that rushing bills to the floor without thinking them through and without preparing explanations beforehand is destructive. But I think many of them will be, and should be, concerned about a measure that allows the scheduling committee to block popular proposals from seeing the floor entirely. I'm wondering if it would destroy your intent for someone to propose an amendment that all proposals given to the scheduling committee must be posted publicly, with a paper that people can sign if they want to see the proposal come to the floor, and if the paper gets, I don't know, one hundred, maybe two hundred signatures, it's considered high-priority and must be scheduled for debate within the week. That maintains the committee's control of scheduling, and allows everyone time to prepare arguments against terrible laws, but prevents the scheduling committee from completely locking out proposals that have strong support."

"Do you have examples of proposals that you think ought to be brought to the floor but wouldn't be without this mechanism? All the ones I can imagine the committee refusing to bring to the floor would be so refused because they'll destroy the country, like exempting us from all taxes or cancelling all debt, or because they're for secret reasons a bad idea, like some things around Razmiran apparently would be."

"...no, not specifically, but that's because I don't know the committee members or any of their opinions on anything likely to be brought to the floor. It is nearly always a really, really bad idea to hand unlimited power to someone you do not know. It is one of the very worst mistakes that anyone can make, because it can't be undone. 

- I actually also wanted to ask you about the Iomedan church's stance on taxation, since - we were talking about that as an obvious example of something that people might destructively bring to the floor, but - I remember that Count Cansellarion initially supported the no-taxes proposal?"

"There are places where the nobility don't pay taxes and it doesn't destroy the country, but it would do so here and we told the Lord Marshal as much and he apologized. Lastwall has taxation, and most of the taxes fall on the wealthy landowners as is fitting and appropriate since they can pay the most.

What if a vote on the composition of the scheduling committee is automatically scheduled for each month and the committee cannot change the date of that vote, so if people are unsatisfied with the current composition it'll be changed?"

"...well, if the mechanism is the same it'll end the same way, right, and if the mechanism is a floor vote it seems like a lot of effort goes into trying to control scheduling committee composition, and the selling point that everyone slated to be on it is a reasonable person evaporates."

"Well, the idea is that we have done our absolutely best to stock it only with reasonable people, but that if we failed and they behave unreasonably we want to be able to recall and replace them. Or did I misunderstand your concern? I agree we do not want a scheduling committee that abuses its power, and we want a way to either override it or replace it if it does."

"My concern is that a scheduling committee which is intended to be used to block bad proposals will probably also be used to block proposals which fall short of the bar that they will destroy the country. If it turned out that a majority of the people who selected representatives were strongly opposed to - I don't know, women being allowed to use the courts, or banning certain contract terms, or a right not to be mindread, or something - then blocking proposals of that nature wouldn't be them abusing their power from the perspective of the people who put them there. It would be them using it as intended, even though these are topics which reasonable people might disagree on. I suppose it's better to have some built in way to replace them so that the scheduling committee itself can't pull an irrecoverable coup, but I don't really expect that.

Maybe they could override the signatures thing if they voted unanimously, or nearly unanimously, or something."

"What about - if two committees pass a bill, then they must schedule it for a floor debate no more than a week after the second committee vote. So Rights might in the worst case need to collaborate with Slavery on contract terms or serfdom, or with Family on women's rights and access to the courts."

Hm.

" - yeah, all right, that should make it hard to lock anything essential out of the floor entirely. How does the scheduling committee interact with things that don't go through committees, like - well, creating new committees is the obvious one. You don't want people creating lots of new ones as a power grab, but you don't want to lock people out of debating procedure or creating new committees, either. Do you petition the scheduling committee directly?"

"You can publish a proposal for a new committee at any time and the scheduling committee schedules debate over it. I guess we could let a committee second proposals for a new committee, if the scheduling committee is holding up a popular one."

"Yeah, okay, I'll speak in favor of that. I still have some general uncertainty about what the Church of Iomedae's priorities are, but - I suppose it's not worth taking up more of your time tonight if it's not going to be decisive."

"Well, separately I'm now considering it my job to make the Church's priorities clear to everybody and accomplish all of them, since the Lord Marshal is not natively trained for politics and I am. So I would be very interested in hearing all of your confusions about what the Church's priorities are."

"It's concerning to me that the Lord Marshal doesn't think that civil courts are necessary to hold people to marriage promises when there are civil penalties for having children outside marriage. I am not sure I would disagree with the viewpoint if I understood what it was, but I don't think I have enough information to know what the full viewpoint is, and in isolation it's just confusing. It's concerning to me that he suggested that a marriage in which one party later leaves is in some sense an obviously fake marriage, such that consulting a Sower could have prevented it, though again I don't think I understand what assumptions it's built on. 

It's concerning to me that Select Wain jumped fairly immediately to purging all evil people from all positions of power. Obviously I don't want a country in which powerful evil people have unchecked power, but Select Wain went so far as to suggest removing children from their parents based on alignment readings, and merely felt that it was not a good first priority with the power we had right now. It's not clear to me what the church thinks should be done with anyone who doesn't meet their moral standards, when they have enough manpower to enforce their ideal. Or - what exactly that ideal consists of, in the first place, besides avoiding taking evil actions."

"Wain did not in fact know anything about Iomedaenism and was as far as I can tell going entirely off what sounded good to her and met with approval in Pezzack, which I think like many fringes of Cheliax had a convenient-for-their-postwar-reckoning distinction between the locals and the men Egorian sent. In many places like that they have killed all the men Egorian sent and killed as collaborators their employees and mistresses and then decided to believe everyone else innocent and not Evil. In Pezzack I think that in fact a lot more people than that died, because they rebelled before the war, but - you can imagine, I hope, why it would be a useful and popular idea, in places far from Egorian, that the evil came from Egorian and was not homegrown, that the evil was just a matter of killing all of the extremely obvious evil people who had done an enormous number of atrocities to your friends and neighbors and who are greatly outnumbered by the ordinary people.

And if that was how it worked, if the only Evil people were the ones that Egorian sent out to its outlying provinces, then that they should all be removed from power and their children should be removed from their parents is a compassionate position by comparison to what I expect usually happened. 

That has fairly little to do with Iomedaenism, but it's how you ought to understand Wain and many of her countrymen."

"I had been under the impression that fighting evil was a fairly central Iomedan concern." This is presumably why Iomedae chose Valia even without her knowing anything about Iomedanism.