I know, for example, one case in a Nóvgorod county where there are a hundred or two of merchant-peasants, and who do not pay a farthing’s worth of taxes. And if a collector, seeing them, tries to collect the revenue, the gentry take the peasant’s part and send the collector away more dead than alive, and the government officers look on, and dare not interfere. And there are some wealthy men, who have some five or six hundred peasants carrying on such illicit trade, and pay not a farthing to the Great Tsar. If all be arranged as I have proposed, commerce will awaken as if from a dream. It is a very bad custom the merchant people have, to do each other wrong by cheating each other. Both foreigners and Russians are in the habit of showing good-looking wares that are badly made within or filled up with bad stuff; or bad wares are mixed with wares of a good quality and are sold as if of good quality, taking for them an unfair price, and greatly deceiving inexperienced people. They give wrong weights and measures, deceive in price, and do not think all that to be a sin, although they cause so much injustice to the inexperienced. Yet those who deceive are in the end ruined through their own iniquity, and become impoverished. ... In order to establish justice in the Merchant Rows, let there be appointed hundred-men and fifty-men and ten-men, and over the shop where there is an hundred-man let there be nailed a round board, painted white, so that it can be easily seen, and on that board let there be written “hundred-man.” Do the same with the shop of the fifty-man and ten-man, so that those who purchase any goods may know where to show their wares, if they should want to find out whether they have received the right weight, or measure, or whether the wares are good or bad, and whether they have paid the correct price for them. If a merchant have received more than the worth of the wares, let him be fined a dime or two for every unfair kopek, and let him be beaten with rods or a whip, that he may not do so again in the future; and if he repeat his offence, let the fine and punishment be increased. But if one give wrong measure and weight, or sell different goods from what the buyer demanded, and give him inferior goods, let his punishment be much more severe, and the fine be ten times the price of the goods.